Ways to save on your electric bill usually get pitched as “turn off the lights and put on a sweater,” which is exactly why I ignored all of them for about three years. Then I read my July statement instead of paying it on autopilot.
My bill was $164. I had been telling myself that was normal for summer and there was nothing to be done. There was plenty to be done, as it turns out, and almost none of it involved the lights. Most ways to save on your electric bill get filed under “nice idea, never doing that,” so below are only the ones I kept: what I changed, what each one saved me, and the popular tip I wasted $40 on so you don’t have to.
Your lights are not the problem
Lighting is close to a rounding error in a house full of LEDs. The money is in whatever makes things hot or cold.
Cooling, the water heater, the dryer and the fridge are your bill. Everything else is noise.
For scale, the U.S. Energy Information Administration put the average residential electricity bill at $178 a month across June through September 2025, up from $173 the summer before. The average home runs about 865 kWh a month at roughly 16.5 cents per kWh. So when your bill jumps in July, you are not imagining it and you are not uniquely bad with money. Summer is expensive.
I spent years feeling guilty about leaving a lamp on while my air conditioner quietly ate half the bill.
The ways to save on your electric bill that moved my number
I tried a lot over two billing cycles and kept whatever showed up on the statement. Feeling virtuous did not count.
- Thermostat up four degrees while I’m out. Biggest single win by a mile. About $21 a month.
- Two power strips on the worst offenders. The TV wall and the desk. Around $9.
- Air-drying most loads. A $22 wooden rack from the hardware store, roughly $9 a month back.
- Cold water washes. Small on its own, about $7, and my clothes are fine.
- Cleaning the fridge coils. Free, took twenty minutes, maybe $4. Worth doing once a year.
That comes to roughly $50 a month for a weekend of small changes. My August bill landed at $121. I stared at it for a second because I did not believe the thermostat thing would carry that much of it.
Cooling is the whole ball game
If you do one thing from this post, do this one. The Department of Energy says you can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by setting your thermostat back 7 to 10 degrees for eight hours a day. Eight hours is a workday. Or a night of sleep.
I keep mine at 78 when I’m gone and drop it to 74 an hour before I get home. One setting, one afternoon of fiddling, and I have not thought about it since.
I got greedy at first and shut the AC off completely during the day. Came home to an 88 degree apartment, the unit ran flat out for four straight hours to claw it back, and I saved nothing. A hot house costs more to cool down than a warm house costs to keep warm, so set the thing back instead of killing it.
My AC spent an entire summer cooling an empty apartment, and I paid for every hour of it.
The nine dollars I was paying to power nothing
Phantom load is real and oversold at the same time. You will read that unplugging your phone charger saves you money. It does not. A charger with nothing in it draws close to zero.
What draws is anything with a standby light, a clock, or a memory: the TV, the soundbar, the game console, the cable box, the monitor, the printer I use twice a year.
I stopped playing whack-a-mole with individual plugs and put one power strip behind the TV and one under the desk. Two switches before bed. About $9 a month, and the honest reason it works is that it costs me no ongoing willpower.
Laundry and dishes: the timing thing nobody explains
This one depends on your utility, and most people never check. Some plans charge more for electricity during peak hours, usually late afternoon into evening. If you’re on one of those, running the dryer at 6pm costs more than running it at 10pm. Same load, same machine, different price.
I’m not on a time-of-use plan, so this saved me nothing at all. But my sister is, and moving her laundry to after 9pm knocked about $14 off her bill without her changing a single other habit. Worth ten minutes to find out.
- Pull up your last statement, the actual PDF, not the app summary.
- Look for the words “time of use,” “peak,” or a rate schedule code.
- If you see one, find the peak window on your utility’s site. It’s usually something like 4pm to 9pm on weekdays.
- Move the dryer, dishwasher, and any EV charging outside that window.
- If you don’t see one, skip this and go back to the thermostat.
Cozy tip: Don’t try all of this in one weekend. Of all the ways to save on your electric bill, the thermostat setback is the one I’d bet on first, so do only that for one full billing cycle and let the statement tell you whether it worked. One change at a time is how you learn what’s doing the work. If it helps to see the whole month laid out, my free printable budget template has a spot for utilities so you can watch the number move.
What I tried that was not worth it
Every other post on this topic pretends everything works. Mine didn’t.
I bought a $40 “energy saving” plug-in device off an ad. It promised to cut my bill 30% by “stabilizing” my power. It did nothing. These things are junk, they’ve been debunked for years, and I was annoyed at myself for a solid week.
Smart thermostats are a more interesting case. ENERGY STAR puts their savings around 8% of heating and cooling costs, or roughly $50 a year. That’s real money. But if you pay $130 for one, you’re looking at more than two years to break even, and a $25 programmable one gets you most of the way there. I’d rather you put that $130 toward your emergency fund and change the setting by hand.
And LED bulbs, the thing everyone recommends first? I’d switched years ago. If you haven’t, do it, it’s worth the afternoon. But it wasn’t a lever I had left to pull, and it won’t fix a $178 bill on its own.
Where the money hides: a labeled example
This is my apartment, scaled to that $178 national summer average so the math is easier to borrow. Your split will look different depending on your climate, your rate, and whether your water heater runs on electricity or gas. But the shape is usually similar, and the shape is the point: the ways to save on your electric bill that pay off are the ones aimed at the top row, not the bottom one.
| Where it goes | Rough share of a $178 bill | What I changed | What it saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooling / AC | $80 | Setback 4 degrees while out | $21 |
| Water heater | $25 | Cold washes, shorter showers | $7 |
| Fridge + kitchen | $22 | Cleaned coils, fridge to 38F | $4 |
| Laundry + dryer | $20 | Drying rack, full loads only | $9 |
| Always-on electronics | $18 | Two power strips, off at night | $9 |
| Lighting | $13 | Nothing, already LED | $0 |
Three mistakes that keep the bill high
- Turning the AC off instead of setting it back. The catch-up run erases your savings and sometimes costs more. Ask me how I know.
- Chasing chargers and lamps while ignoring the thermostat. You can unplug every phone cable in the house and save less than four degrees will save you in a week.
- Changing six things at once. Your bill moves and you have no idea which change did it, so you keep doing all six forever, including the useless ones.
If your bill feels high because the whole month is tight, and not only the electricity, then the utility line is rarely where the real fix lives. That’s a budget conversation, and I wrote the gentler version of it in breaking the paycheck to paycheck cycle. There’s more context in our 2026 budgeting statistics if you like knowing where you sit next to everyone else, and a pile of other levers in the saving money archive.
Frequently Asked Questions
What uses the most electricity in a home?
Heating and cooling, by a wide margin, followed by the water heater, the dryer, and the refrigerator. Lighting is a small slice in most modern homes because LEDs use so little. If you want your bill to drop, start with the thermostat rather than the light switches.
What temperature should I set my thermostat to in summer to save money?
The Department of Energy’s guidance is to set it back 7 to 10 degrees from your normal setting for about eight hours a day, which can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling. I keep mine at 78 while I’m out and 74 in the evening. Set it back rather than switching it off completely, or the catch-up run will eat the savings.
Does unplugging things lower your electric bill?
A little, and only for the right things. Anything with a standby light, a clock, or a memory draws power around the clock: TVs, consoles, cable boxes, soundbars. Phone chargers with nothing attached draw close to nothing. Two power strips got me about $9 a month, which is real but nowhere near what the thermostat did.
Are those plug-in energy saving devices legit?
No. The ones advertised as “stabilizing” your power to cut your bill 30% do not work and have been debunked for years. I bought one for $40 and it changed nothing. Keep your money.
Why is my electric bill so high all of a sudden?
In summer it’s almost always cooling, especially during a heat wave when your AC runs far longer than usual. Rates climb too: the EIA had summer bills averaging $178 a month in 2025 against $173 the year before. Check whether your utility charges peak-hour rates, and compare this month to the same month last year rather than to last month.
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