How to Lower Your Electric Bill

If you want a lower electric bill, aim at heating, cooling and hot water first, because that is where most of your kilowatt hours go. Everything else on the usual list is worth doing and none of it is worth doing first, which is the part most articles on this subject get backwards.

This post is about changes you make. If your bill jumped suddenly and you want to know what went wrong, that is a different question with a different answer, and we wrote it up separately in why is my electric bill so high. Read that one if the number surprised you. Read this one if the number has just always been higher than you'd like.

What actually uses the most electricity in a home

A kilowatt hour costs the same no matter what spends it, so the only thing that decides whether a change matters is how many kilowatt hours it touches.

Federal estimates put heating and cooling at roughly half of a typical home's energy use, and nothing else comes close. Water heating is usually second. After that come the loads that run all day at low power or hard for short bursts: refrigeration, laundry, cooking, the pile of electronics nobody counts. Lighting used to be around a tenth of a home's electricity and is measurably less than that now, because most houses have already swapped a lot of bulbs. Standby draw, the power things use while doing nothing, is commonly put at five to ten percent, and higher in a house full of always-on equipment.

So the order writes itself. Ten percent off your heating and cooling beats every LED bulb in the house. Both are worth doing. Only one of them is worth doing this weekend.

One thing to settle before you plan anything: whether your heat is electric or not. It changes the entire shape of the bill. In some towns on our map the split is close to even, Buchanan among them, and a house on electric resistance heat carries the largest sustained load a home ever sees for months at a stretch. A house with gas heat and a heat pump has a much flatter winter and a much different list of priorities.

The thermostat is the biggest lever you own

It is also free, which is rare in this business.

Setpoint and runtime are the whole game. Every degree closer to the outdoor temperature is less work for the system, and the hours you're asleep or at work are hours nobody needs the house held at a comfort setting. A programmable or smart thermostat is only doing what you could do by hand; its value is that it actually does it every day.

Heat pumps deserve one caution, because the obvious move backfires. A deep setback overnight means the house has a lot of ground to make up in the morning, and a heat pump making up ground in a hurry calls in its auxiliary heat, which is straight electric resistance at several times the wattage. That erases the savings and then some. Keep setbacks modest, or use a thermostat with adaptive recovery that starts early and stays off the strips.

Then the maintenance that shortens runtime: a clean filter, unblocked returns and supply registers, and outdoor coils that aren't packed with grass clippings. A system that reaches the setpoint and shuts off costs less than a system limping toward it all afternoon. If yours runs nearly continuously on a mild day, that is an HVAC service call, and it will pay for itself faster than anything else on this page.

The rest of the heating and cooling savings live in the envelope: attic insulation, air sealing, weatherstripping, duct leaks. None of that is electrical work. It is exactly the kind of work our sister company Journey Home Services does, and we mention them because it is the honest answer, not because it puts anything on our schedule.

Hot water, the quiet second place

Three changes, in order of how much they usually return.

Check the tank's temperature setting. The standard published recommendation is 120 degrees, and plenty of tanks are sitting well above that from the factory or from somebody's guess. Every degree above what you need is heat you're paying to make and then losing through the tank wall.

Fix hot side drips. A faucet that drips cold water wastes water. A faucet that drips hot water wastes water and the energy that heated it, quietly, all day, and the tank keeps reheating to feed it.

Insulate what you reasonably can. The first several feet of pipe leaving the tank is easy and cheap. A tank blanket helps on an older uninsulated unit, but read the label first, because many modern tanks are already insulated well enough that a blanket does nothing, and some manufacturers say not to cover them at all.

What we'd skip is a timer. On a modern tank the standby loss is modest, so a timer saves less than people expect and buys you a house with no hot water at the wrong moment. If the tank is due for replacement anyway, a heat pump water heater is the change with real numbers behind it, and it needs its own look at your panel, your space and your drain before you buy one.

Where a ceiling fan genuinely helps, and where it's pure waste

A ceiling fan does not cool a room. It cools people, by moving air across skin so sweat evaporates faster. The air in the room is very slightly warmer with the fan running, because the motor adds heat.

That single fact settles two things. First, a fan running in an empty room is not saving anything. It is a small load with nobody to cool, and if the habit is to leave them all on all day, turning them off in the rooms nobody is in costs you nothing and saves you something. Second, the real money isn't the fan. It's what the fan lets you do with the thermostat. The Department of Energy's figure is that a ceiling fan lets you raise the setting about four degrees with no loss in comfort, and four degrees off a compressor that pulls thousands of watts is a genuinely different bill than a fan motor pulling tens of watts.

Direction matters too, in both seasons, and it is a smaller switch on the motor housing that most people never touch. We put the whole of it in ceiling fan direction for summer and winter. If you're short a fan in the room that needs one, what ceiling fan installation costs covers what the job involves, and ceiling fan installation is the service page. The one thing worth saying here is that a fan needs a box rated and marked for a fan, not the ordinary ceiling box a light hangs on. That is a safety item, not a preference.

LEDs: worth doing, honestly sized

Here is the arithmetic, so you can size it yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it.

A 60 watt incandescent bulb replaced with a 9 watt LED saves 51 watts while it's on. Run three hours a day and that's about 4.6 kilowatt hours a month saved, per bulb. Multiply by the cost per kilowatt hour you can work out from your own bill by dividing the total by the kilowatt hours on it.

Now you can see where it pays and where it doesn't. The bulbs worth swapping are the ones that run the longest: the kitchen, the room the family actually sits in, the porch light, a security light, the shop fixture that gets left on. Old halogen can lights and outdoor floodlights are the best swaps in most houses, because halogen burns a lot of watts to make its light. The closet, the attic, the guest room nobody uses, those bulbs can burn out on their own schedule. A bulb that runs ten minutes a week saves you nothing measurable no matter what it costs to buy.

Two practical notes from doing this work. Dimmers are where LED swaps go wrong: an old dimmer built for incandescent loads makes new LEDs flicker, buzz, or refuse to dim low, and the fix is a dimmer matched to the fixtures rather than a different bulb. If your lights already flicker without any of that, read lights flickering in your house first, because some flicker is a loose connection and that one is not a savings question.

And in older neighborhoods the swap sometimes runs into the house itself. In parts of Rome, houses from the bungalow era were built with one ceiling light per room and shallow boxes behind the switch plates, boxes that were never meant to swallow the body of a modern dimmer. That is why "upgrade the lighting" in a hundred year old house is a wiring conversation rather than a bulb conversation, and it's the work behind our lighting installation page.

Outdoors, control beats wattage. A photocell or timer that shuts the landscape lighting off at midnight saves more than picking a slightly more efficient fixture and leaving it burning until dawn.

Standby draw: real, small, and easy to sort

Every house has a floor of always-on draw, a few hundred watts of routers, chargers, speakers and clocks. Chasing all of it is not worth your Saturday. Chasing the four or five that are actually big is.

The ones we see: an old cable or satellite box, which can draw nearly as much sitting idle as it does playing; a console left in instant-on; a dehumidifier running in a crawlspace with a vent open somewhere; an aquarium; and the second refrigerator or chest freezer in a hot garage, which is a real load rather than a phantom and is often the biggest surprise in the house. A plug-in watt meter settles any of them in a day.

Your phone charger is not the problem. It never was.

Laundry, and the dryer question underneath it

Wash in cold when the load allows, run full loads, and use the highest spin speed the fabric tolerates, because water the washer pulls out is water the dryer doesn't have to boil off. Then clean the dryer vent, which is the one that actually moves a number: a restricted vent makes a dryer take two cycles to do one cycle's work, doubling one of the larger loads in the house.

If the dryer itself is on its way out, the replacement decision is worth understanding before you shop, because it is really a decision about the hookup in your laundry room rather than about the appliance. We wrote that one up as gas dryer vs electric dryer.

Four things that don't work

Plug-in "power saver" boxes. These are sold hard and they do not lower a residential bill. The claim is power factor correction, and residential meters bill you for real energy, not for the reactive component those devices claim to fix. If a device promises to cut your bill by a percentage just by being plugged into an outlet, it is not doing anything a meter can see.

A bigger panel. Panel upgrades are worth doing for capacity and for safety, and they are worth doing on their own merits. They do not lower a bill. Capacity is not consumption, and a 200 amp service does not use less power than a 100 amp service running the same appliances. Anyone selling a panel as an energy saving measure is selling you something else.

Closing vents in unused rooms. It seems obvious and it usually costs more. Closed vents raise pressure in the duct system, which pushes more air out of every leak in it and makes the blower fight itself.

Turning the water heater off between uses. The tank takes most of it back when it reheats from cold, you get a cold shower for your trouble, and stored water sitting cool for long stretches carries its own reasons not to. Set it to 120 and leave it there instead.

When the bill is telling you something electrical

Most of the time it isn't, and we'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. But there are two shapes of electrical problem that show up as a bill instead of as a symptom, and they're worth knowing about because both of them are cheap to check and expensive to ignore.

The first is something running that shouldn't be. A heating element that has failed in a way that lets it draw current the thermostat can't switch off, a pump cycling on its own, a circuit holding a steady draw with the house asleep. The tell is that your changes don't move the number, because the load isn't discretionary. The diagnostic sequence for that, including the meter test that isolates it to one circuit, is in why is my electric bill so high, and it costs you fifteen minutes and nothing else.

The second is a connection wasting energy as heat. This one wastes very little power, so it will not explain a bill, and we're saying so because plenty of people will tell you otherwise. It matters anyway: a loose or corroded connection turns a small amount of energy into heat in one spot, over and over, and that is a fire mechanism rather than a billing problem. Warm breakers, a warm receptacle, a scorch mark, or a faint burnt smell moves this to the top of the list regardless of what your bill says. That is what an electrical inspection is looking for.

Houses that were lived in continuously and modified in layers collect this kind of thing. The mill village houses in Lindale are the clearest local example: a circuit run for a window unit in one decade, a dryer landed in the next, a carport light after that, and somewhere in all of it a splice made outside a box and covered over. Nobody can check a joint they can't reach.

There is one genuinely useful thing we can install for the measurement side of this. A whole home energy monitor mounts in or beside the panel with current transformers clamped around the main conductors, and it shows you consumption in real time and by circuit if you clamp enough of them. It will not save you a kilowatt hour by itself. What it does is end the guessing, which is usually what people are actually paying for when they hire someone to chase a bill.

The order worth doing it in

Thermostat behavior and HVAC maintenance first, because that's where half the energy is. Water heater setting and hot side drips next. Then the fans, used on people and switched off in empty rooms. Then LEDs in the fixtures that actually run, and controls on anything outdoors. Then the second fridge, the old set-top box, and whatever else the watt meter finds. Then, if the number still doesn't move, ask whether something is running that you didn't choose.

That's the list, in the order the kilowatt hours justify, and it is the difference between reducing an electric bill and just worrying about one. Tell us what your house runs on and what you've already tried, and Tanner will tell you honestly which parts of it are ours and which parts aren't.