Heating: the biggest lever
Heating accounts for roughly 55–65% of the average UK household energy bill, with the exact proportion depending on home size, building type, and how cold your winters are. In older rented properties with poor insulation, this proportion is even higher. The interventions with the highest impact per unit of effort are:
Turning the thermostat down by 1°C. Each degree you reduce your heating setpoint typically saves between 6–10% of your heating energy use. A house heated to 21°C instead of 22°C doesn't feel significantly different in most rooms, but the saving over a heating season (roughly October to April in northern England) is noticeable on an annual bill. You don't need to go cold — going from 22°C to 20°C is the range where most people don't feel a meaningful comfort difference but the bill impact is real.
Using the timer rather than leaving heating always-on or always-off. The old myth that leaving heating on low all day is cheaper than heating up from cold in the morning has been definitively disproven for well-insulated homes. For poorly insulated homes (which includes many older rented properties), it's more nuanced — but for most renters in standard flat or terraced house environments, a 45-minute warm-up before you need the heat is more efficient than maintaining background heat all day when you're not home.
Not heating rooms you're not using. If your flat has a second bedroom that's used as a storage room, close the radiator valve. Thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) are present on most modern radiators and allow you to set each room to a different temperature — turning unused rooms to 1 or 2 (frost protection or minimal heating) rather than 3 or 4 reduces overall boiler run time.
Draught-proofing: low cost, immediate impact
Draught-proofing is one of the few energy-saving measures that costs almost nothing, requires no landlord permission, and makes an immediate comfort and cost difference. The main sources of draughts in rental properties are letterboxes (if your flat has a front door that opens to the outside), gaps around window frames, gaps at the bottom of internal doors, and disused fireplaces.
Draught excluders for door bottoms cost a few pounds from any hardware shop and attach without drilling or permanent fixing. Foam self-adhesive tape applied around window frames fills small gaps and is removable without damage. A chimney balloon in an unused fireplace can reduce the volume of heated air escaping up the flue significantly — but check with your landlord before using one if there's any uncertainty about the chimney status.
We're not saying draught-proofing alone will halve your heating bill. For a well-fitted modern flat it makes minimal difference because the building envelope is already reasonably airtight. For an older draughty Victorian terrace or converted flat with original sash windows, it can make a perceptible difference to both comfort and heating cost — reducing heat loss through draughts can save the equivalent of one to two weeks of heating per year.
Hot water: the second-biggest energy cost
After space heating, domestic hot water is typically the second largest element of a gas household's energy bill — around 15–20% of total consumption. Most of the relevant savings here come from behaviour rather than equipment:
Shower time: A standard shower uses approximately 8–12 litres of hot water per minute. Reducing shower time from 10 minutes to 7 minutes saves roughly 30% of the hot water used per shower. If your household showers daily, this adds up. You don't need a specialised shower timer to track this — most people have a reasonable sense of how long they're showering once they think about it.
Hot water cylinder temperature: If your property has a hot water cylinder (a large insulated tank, typically in an airing cupboard), check the thermostat setting. The recommended setting is 60°C, which prevents legionella bacteria growth while not overheating water unnecessarily. Some older properties have cylinders set much higher — 70°C or above — which wastes energy keeping water hotter than it needs to be. Reducing to 60°C from a higher setting is a simple adjustment and one your landlord has no reason to object to.
Appliances and standby: smaller savings, still worth knowing
Appliance usage typically accounts for 15–20% of a UK household's electricity bill. The main interventions:
Washing at 30°C or 40°C instead of 60°C. Modern laundry detergents are formulated to work at lower temperatures. Heating water for a 60°C wash uses significantly more energy than a 30°C or 40°C cycle with the same results for most everyday laundry. The exception is bedding and towels where hygiene standards warrant a monthly 60°C wash.
Standby power. The total standby power of a modern household is lower than it was 15 years ago due to energy efficiency standards, but it's not zero. A television, gaming console, broadband router, and several device chargers in standby collectively use a few kilowatt-hours per week. For most renters this represents a modest saving — worth noting but not the place to focus primary effort.
Fridge and freezer temperature. Fridges are typically most efficient at 3–5°C, freezers at -18°C. Settings significantly colder than these waste energy without materially improving food preservation. If the fridge in your rental came with the property and you've never checked the temperature, it's worth verifying — older appliances sometimes have inaccurate thermostat dials.
Your Arrival dashboard as a monitoring tool
If you're registered with Arrival, your dashboard shows daily electricity and gas consumption pulled from your smart meter. The alert feature notifies you if your usage in any category is tracking more than 15% above the previous month. This kind of feedback loop — seeing your consumption as a specific number rather than an abstract concept — helps reinforce behavioural changes. You can see in real terms whether the thermostat reduction made a difference to your daily usage, rather than waiting for a quarterly bill.
None of the changes in this guide requires a conversation with your landlord. They work across almost any rented property type, from a studio flat in a 1970s block to a shared terraced house. The combination of heating setpoint reduction, basic draught-proofing, and adjusted hot water habits can reduce a typical UK renter's energy bill by 10–20% without any structural changes — which at current energy prices represents a meaningful annual saving even within the OFGEM price cap framework.