Save £100 in 10 minutes

Around 90% of you could save £100 in 10 minutes today. Neil Faulkner explains exactly how to do it.

This is one of the easiest ways to save money in your lunch hour.

It seems to me that all the energy suppliers are always claiming they are the cheapest and that's because they use different measures to do so. One says it offers the cheapest average price across all its tariffs, another says it offers the cheapest standard tariff, another says its cheapest tariff is the cheapest of the lot, and another says it has the cheapest tariff in the most regions.

Later, I'll show you which supplier is cheapest based on quotes taken from our energy comparison tool. Firstly, I'd like to share some other interesting statistics I gathered from it.

Half of quotes save £180 or more

Over about two weeks, lovemoney.com users had around 25,000 quotes through our energy tool, which takes about 10 minutes to use. The average saving quoted was £215. Half of savings quotes reduced prices by £180 or more.

In the following table I've split quotes into ten equal-sized groups. The first group shows the average quoted saving for the best 10% of quotes. (That means the roughly 2,500 quotes that showed the biggest reductions.) Each following group is the next 10%, with the worst reductions in the final row of the table:

On average, maybe 10% of you should save around £40 (last row), which isn't worth switching for. However, 90% could save, on average, £100 or more in the 10 minutes it takes to use our energy comparison tool - with 10% saving more than £550!

How useful is a 'quote'?

Of course, these are just quotes, not guarantees, and most tariffs are variable. However, in my opinion, lovemoney.com has the most accurate comparison tool on the Web. It's the only one that allows you to enter your precise tariff and how much you spend each month/how much energy you use every year. This means it is extremely accurate so long as you use a similar amount of energy over the following twelve months. If you expect to use more or less, you need to take that into account. Be sure to select the correct supplier and enter the right details, or the savings quoted won't be as accurate.

Recent question on this topic

• pasquires asks:

  How can I save money on utility bills when the quoted prices per unit are higher than my current bills?

  • 
    MikeGG1 answered "Perhaps you have a price guarantee that was keeping your prices down. The savings quoted are just..."
  • 
    champ69 answered "I got £55 and £50 cashback from changing to EDF and Scot Power, when I went through..."
  • Read more answers

Bear in mind that all energy comparison tools take into account annual discounts or cashback in the results, as is required under their joint code of conduct. Therefore, if you think you'll want to switch again some time soon, you should look to see if you'll lose out on some of the quoted savings by forfeiting annual discounts or bonuses, and check to see if you'll have to pay an exit fee.

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Compare gas and electricity through lovemoney.com