Households with toasters face £9 charges from April | Personal Finance | Finance

Households with toasters can expect to spend just £9 a year running them from April, thanks to the upcoming energy price cap reduction.

With many families still feeling the squeeze from rising living costs, even small savings can feel like a win. A toaster might only save you around £1 a year under the new cap, but when you add up similar reductions across your appliances, the difference can start to add up. The change will come as Ofgem lowers the energy price cap by around £117 for the period from April 1 to June 30, compared with the first three months of the year.

It will be set at £1,641 a year for a “typical household”, which pays for both electricity and gas by Direct Debit. When you compare it to January to March, the cap was much higher, at £1,758.

The unit rate for electricity will also drop by around 3 pence, to 24.67p per kilowatt hour (kWh). To put that into real-life terms, appliances will cost less to run.

Let’s look at the humble toaster. Most toasters use around 1,000 watts of power (1kW). If you somehow ran one for a full hour — not recommended — it would cost 24.67p under the new rate.

But of course, nobody does that. According to Smart Money Tools, the average household uses a toaster for about six minutes a day, so we need to work out one-tenth of the hourly rate.

That works out at roughly 3p worth of electricity per day. Over a month, that’s around 75p, and across a year it comes to about £9.01.

Under the previous price cap, when electricity cost 27.69p per kWh, the same usage would have cost around £10.11 per year, meaning households could save around £1 from their toaster alone.

It might not sound like much, but when similar reductions apply to several appliances around the home, those small savings can begin to make a noticeable difference.

Energy use varies widely between appliances. A toaster typically uses around 1,000 watts, while microwaves often run slightly lower at around 800 watts.

The reduction came as part of a Government pledge to reduce bills by an average of £150. “This means millions of households will benefit from lower energy bills,” it said in a February announcement.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the BBC that the Government was “putting more money in people’s pockets,” and improving public services.

But Conservative Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho said Labour was “pulling the wool over people’s eyes by moving some costs off of your energy bill and putting them straight onto your tax bill“.

The cap is based on a “typical household” using 11,500 kWh of gas and 2,700 kWh of electricity a year, with a single bill for gas and electricity, settled by direct debit.