FAMILIES might not know that they could be adding £87 onto their energy bills just by using their kettle wrong.
Households are being clobbered with eye-watering hikes to energy bills as a cost of living crisis bites.
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Millions of families saw their bills DOUBLE to an average of £1,971 from April 1 when the new price cap – which limits how much suppliers can charge customers for energy – rolled out.
It means hard-up households are struggling to pay their bills, facing the difficult decision between heating or eating.
As costs soar, you’ll want to know how to lower your bills.
Uswitch said that simply just changing the way you are using your kettle could save you £87.
The comparison site’s head of policy Justina Miltienyte told the Mirror you should only fill up the kettle with the water you actually need to save yourself cash.
If you have a 3kwh kettle, than it takes 1p to boil one cup of tea of coffee in one minute.
But if you fill up your kettle five times more than that, it would take five minutes to boil and cost 7p.
That means you could be wasting 24p a day if you boiled the kettle four times a day and overfilled it.
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Over the year, that totals a whopping £87.60 of wasted cash boiling water you don’t need.
The exact savings you could make though depends on the type of kettle you have, the amount you’re using it and how much you’re filling it up by.
Ms Miltienyte told the Mirror: “Although the savings you make by filling your kettle up with just enough water for each drink only represent a few pence, this all adds up over the course of a year.”
Making other changes to the way you’re making a cuppa will save you cash too.
According to Utilita, leaving a kettle switched on at the wall adds £4.87 to an end-of-year energy bill.
Turn it off at the plug will help you keep that fiver in your pocket.
You might even want to ditch the kettle entirely.
Although kettles usually take fewer units of energy to heat water, the current sky-high cost of electricity cancels out these savings – so PlumbNation heating expert Jordan Chance said using a gas hob could be better for your bills.
How else can I save money on energy bills?
Making sure your home is insulated can help reduce energy bills.
You can calculate all the waste energy lost room by room in your house, and you might be able to switch something off or plug a draughty gap.
Energy saving devices could help lower your bill, like smart lightbulbs or an airfryer.
One savvy saver uses smart radiator valves to reduce his energy consumption, helping cut his bill by £220 a year.
Showering at a specific time could save energy, as could other water saving measures.
Martin Lewis revealed that you could save £100 a year by turning off your router overnight.
In fact, switching off “vampire” appliances that are using energy unnecessarily – like computers, outdoor lights, and electric towel rails – could save you up to hundreds of pounds a year.
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