How to Lower Your Electricity Bill: 10 Practical Ways to Save.

Electricity bills rarely go up because of one big thing. They creep up from a dozen small ones: a thermostat left at the same setting around the clock, a game console that never fully powers down, a washing machine defaulting to warm. None of that shows up as a line item on your bill, so it’s easy to blame the utility company instead of the settings.

The ten changes below are ranked roughly by impact for a typical household, from the ones that cost nothing and take five minutes, to the ones worth planning around your next appliance purchase. Where a real number exists — a percentage, a dollar figure — it’s cited to the agency or program that measured it, not rounded up for effect.

1. Audit your bill before you change anything

Skip this step and you end up optimizing the wrong thing — swapping light bulbs when your real cost driver is an aging water heater running longer than it should. Most utilities now break down usage by category inside their online portal or app, and it’s worth five minutes to look before you spend money on anything else in this list.

In a typical U.S. home, space heating and cooling make up the largest single share of energy use, which is why the next two tips focus there.¹ If your breakdown looks unusual — a spike with no obvious cause — that’s worth investigating on its own before tackling the list below.

2. Set — don’t just lower — your thermostat

The Department of Energy’s figure here is specific: you can save roughly 1% off your heating cost for every degree you set back, if the setback holds for at least eight hours.² DOE’s own recommendation is 68°F while home and awake in winter, 78°F in summer, with a 7–10 degree setback while you’re asleep or out — which works out to about 10% off your annual heating and cooling costs.³

The common objection — that reheating a cold house “costs more” than holding a steady temperature — doesn’t hold up. A home closer in temperature to the outdoors loses heat more slowly, so the total energy spent over the day goes down, not up.⁴ The practical unlock is a programmable or smart thermostat, so the setback happens automatically instead of depending on you remembering it every night. If you’re shopping for one alongside a new air conditioner, our guide to choosing an energy-efficient air conditioner covers what’s worth paying for.

3. Cut the standby power you’re not using

Standby power — sometimes called phantom load — is electricity drawn by devices that are switched off but still plugged in: game consoles, cable boxes, phone chargers, a microwave’s clock display. DOE estimates this accounts for 5–10% of the average home’s electricity use, costing $92 to $183 a year.⁵

You don’t need to unplug everything nightly to capture most of this. Put your TV, console, and cable box on one power strip and your kitchen counter appliances on another, then flip the strip off when you’re not using that group of devices. It’s a five-second habit that eliminates the draw entirely, rather than just reducing it.

4. Finish switching to LED

If this feels like advice from a decade ago, that’s fair — but a lot of homes still have incandescent bulbs in secondary fixtures: closets, garages, basement stairwells, the fixture nobody thinks about because it’s rarely on for long. ENERGY STAR-certified LEDs use about 75% less energy than incandescent bulbs and last roughly 10 to 25 times longer, and a single certified bulb can save more than $40 in electricity over its lifetime.⁶

The math favors your most-used fixtures first — kitchen, living room, porch light — not the closet you open twice a week. Replace those five or six sockets and you’ve captured most of the available saving before you’ve spent much money.

5. Wash in cold water

This one is almost entirely about water heating, not the machine itself. ENERGY STAR puts it plainly: heating water accounts for about 90% of the total energy a washing machine uses per cycle.⁷ Switching from hot to warm roughly cuts that energy use in half; switching to cold cuts it further still.⁷

Unless you’re dealing with oily stains or laundry that needs sanitizing, cold water gets clothes clean with a detergent formulated for it — most mainstream detergents are. Pair that with only running full loads, and skip the dishwasher’s heated dry cycle in favor of air-drying, and you’ve addressed the two biggest energy costs in a kitchen and laundry room without buying anything new.

6. Stop overworking the fridge

Your refrigerator is the one appliance that never gets a rest — it runs every hour of every day, which makes small inefficiencies compound. A fuller fridge holds temperature better than a mostly empty one because the cold mass buffers against door openings. Worn door seals let cold air escape continuously, forcing the compressor to run longer to compensate — press a dollar bill in the door and see if it slides out easily; if it does, the seal likely needs replacing.

Set the fridge to the manufacturer’s recommended range (usually 35–38°F) rather than colder “to be safe.” If yours is more than a decade old, it’s also worth comparing its estimated running cost against a new ENERGY STAR model — see our roundup of energy-efficient appliances.

7. Seal the leaks pulling on your HVAC system

Gaps around windows, exterior doors, and attic hatches let conditioned air escape and outside air in, which means your heating and cooling system runs longer to hold the temperature you set in tip #2 — undercutting that saving before you’ve even noticed. Weatherstripping, a door sweep, and a tube of caulk typically run under $40 combined and are a weekend project, not a contractor job.

Thick curtains, closed at night in winter and during peak sun in summer, add a second layer of insulation at essentially no cost.

8. Move heavy usage off peak hours

If your utility bills time-of-use rates, electricity during the late afternoon and early evening peak can cost noticeably more per kilowatt-hour than overnight or midday rates — sometimes by a wide margin, depending on the provider. Running the dishwasher, washer, and dryer outside that window (most machines have a delay-start button) lowers your bill without using less electricity overall, just shifting when you use it.

Not every utility uses time-of-use pricing — check a recent bill or your provider’s rate schedule to see whether this applies to you before rearranging your routine around it.

9. Keep your HVAC system maintained

A dirty air filter forces the blower motor to work harder to push the same amount of air, which quietly raises your electricity use for months before anyone notices a drop in comfort. Replace filters every one to three months, keep the outdoor condenser unit clear of leaves and debris, and get an annual professional tune-up if your system is more than a few years old. None of this reduces your bill dramatically on its own, but it prevents your system from gradually losing the efficiency it was built with.

10. Recheck your rate plan once a year

In deregulated electricity markets, or with utilities offering multiple plan structures, it’s common to end up on a plan that no longer fits your usage — a fixed-rate contract that expired into a higher variable rate, or a time-of-use plan for a household that’s home all day. Comparing current plans once a year takes a few minutes and occasionally turns up savings with zero change in behavior.

Before signing up for any plan or promotional offer that sounds unusually good, it’s worth reading how to tell if a “deal” is actually a good deal — the discount period, the rate after it ends, and any early-termination terms matter more than the headline number.

Start with two, not ten

The thermostat schedule and the standby-power power strips are the two changes most households can make tonight, and together they touch the two categories DOE identifies as the largest and most overlooked shares of a home electricity bill.^2,5 Layer in the rest over the following months rather than all at once — consistency matters more here than intensity, since most of these savings compound over a full year of billing cycles, not a single month.

Common questions

Which single change saves the most money?

For most households it’s thermostat scheduling, since heating and cooling is typically the largest category on a residential electricity bill and DOE’s own estimate puts the annual saving from a consistent setback at up to 10%.³ Standby power is the close second, since it applies to nearly every home regardless of climate.

Do smart plugs and power strips actually pay for themselves?

Usually within the first year. A basic mechanical power strip costs $10–$15, and eliminating even half of a household’s estimated $92–$183 in annual standby-power cost covers that many times over.⁵ Smart plugs cost more but add scheduling, which helps if you’re prone to forgetting to flip a switch.

Is it true that turning things off and on uses more energy than leaving them running?

For lighting and most home electronics, no — this is a leftover myth from older fluorescent tubes, which did draw a brief surge on startup. LEDs and modern electronics don’t have this issue in any way that offsets the savings from turning them off.

How long does it take to see these savings on a bill?

Behavioral changes like thermostat scheduling and standby power show up within the very next billing cycle. Changes tied to a purchase — LED bulbs, an ENERGY STAR appliance — take longer to “pay back,” typically months to a few years depending on the item, but continue saving for the life of the product afterward.

Sources

1. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), end-use breakdowns by category.
2. U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Saver — “Do you set back your thermostat?” — approximately 1% savings per degree for an 8-hour setback.
3. U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Saver — recommended thermostat settings and setback guidance (68°F winter / 78°F summer, 7–10°F setback).
4. U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Saver — explanation of heat-loss rate and why setbacks save energy despite recovery time.
5. U.S. Department of Energy standby-power estimate (5–10% of residential electricity use, $92–$183/year), as reported by EnergySage.
6. ENERGY STAR — LED bulb energy use, lifespan, and lifetime savings figures.
7. ENERGY STAR — Clothes Washers page; water heating share of per-cycle energy use.

MoneySavvyLab’s money-saving guides are checked against current Department of Energy, ENERGY STAR, and EIA guidance at the time of publication. Utility rates, rebates, and program details vary by state and provider — figures here are national averages, not a guarantee for any specific bill.