Does a smart meter save money on energy bills?
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- Issue Time
- Jan 30,2019
Does a smart meter save money on energy bills?
Saving money with an energy smart meter
The energy smart meter rollout is well underway, with more than 12 million devices already in homes — find out if upgrading to a smart meter will save you money on your energy bills
When “savings” and “smart meters” are mentioned together as a reason to upgrade your meter, there are generally two different savings being referenced:
Savings on your energy consumption
Savings on your energy bill costs
While the two are of course linked, the question is how much would you save on either if you changed from a standard meter to an energy smart meter?
Smart meter energy savings
Smart Energy GB, the organisation that runs the awareness campaign for the national roll out, put out a report in 2017 that found that 86% of smart meter households made changes to their behaviour that resulted in making an energy saving.
Those surveyed reported finding the in-home display valuable in understanding how their behaviour — such boiling the kettle or running the dishwasher — impacts their consumption in real-time.
A smart meter’s in home display also computes that consumption into pounds and pence by linking it to your household’s energy tariff.
So, if you are paying 16 pence per kWh of electricity, and have a daily standing charge of 22 pence, and use 2 kWh to boil the kettle several times a day, your smart meter in home display will calculate this activity into an easy-to-understand, pounds-and-pence figure you can view daily, weekly or monthly.
The aim in providing this visibility is that households will change their daily behaviour based on a new level of understanding of how that behaviour impacts their consumption and their costs.