Domestic Energy Benchmarking

A good starting point for reducing a household's domestic energy consumption and carbon emissions, is to work out current annual energy consumption. The easiest way is to look at old fuel bills, choosing only those which contain actual meter readings, rather than estimates. These should cover at least a year, since most energy use is highly seasonal.

Knowing annual gas and electricity consumption for a household means that the effect of changes can be assessed, and there's nothing like seeing positive results to encourage further effort.

Comparison with the average for other UK households can also be useful.  Of course larger houses tend to use more gas and electricity but the table below is broken down by housing type so makes allowances for this.

These figures are averages over the whole of England so, inevitably, there will be specific factors to take into account, e.g. households in the warmer south of the country probably  need rather less gas than the mean for similar types of dwelling in the north, and household composition and circumstances also have an effect.

Other interesting data can be downloaded from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) website at http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/publications/ecuk/ecuk.aspx#