How to save on energy bills and check if you are eligible for low income grants

Microwaves are more efficient than ovens at cooking as they only heat the food and not the air space inside. If you avoid overfilling the kettle, you could save £11 a year on your electricity bill.

*Lighting takes up around five per cent of an average home’s total energy bill. LED bulbs are the most efficient. If the average household replaced all light bulbs with LEDs, it would cost about £180 and save around £60 a year on bills.

Turning your lights off when you are not using them or when you leave a room will save you around £20 a year and will stop your partner quoting that old phrase “It’s like Blackpool illuminations in this house”.

*Also ensure you control which rooms you heat. You can save around £70 a year turning radiator valves down to between 2.5 and three in rooms you don’t use or you can have thermostatic radiator valves installed to set the temperature of each individual room. These cost around £10 each.

Dropping the temperature on your central heating’s thermostat by one degree could save £100 a year on average for a typical home.

*Draught-proofing is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to save energy in your home. Block up unwanted gaps that let cold air in and warm air out. Use good old fashioned draught excluders and letter box flaps or brush covers. You can also buy draught-proofing strips for windows.

*Insulating your hot water pipes will also help reduce heat loss from your system. Pipe lagging will also prevent pipes from getting too cold in winter and help stop them from bursting.

You can buy foam pipe insulation tubes online or from DIY stores. Simply slip them over your pipes. This will save £3 a year on your energy bills, as well as reducing the possibility of expensive repair bills from burst pipes. It’s not a lot in monetary terms but think about incremental gains.

*A quarter of heat is lost through the roof in an uninsulated home. Insulating your loft, attic or flat roof is an effective way to reduce heat loss and reduce your heating bills.

Installed correctly, loft insulation should pay for itself many times over in its 40-year lifetime. Costs vary from £700 for a small terraced house to £1,200 for a large detached home.

The majority of homes have some loft insulation but many don’t have enough. The recommended depth is now 270mm. Topping up your loft insulation from 120mm to 270mm could cost around £240 but your home will feel warmer.

*Insulate your walls. Most homes built after 1920 have cavity walls. If your cavity walls are uninsulated, adding cavity wall insulation could save up to £150 a year off your energy bills but be aware not all are suitable

If your home has structural issues like cracks in the walls, rising or penetrating damp, dirty cavities, wall-ties or rubble in the cavity and if the outside walls are exposed to driving rain, cavity wall insulation may do more harm than good.

If there is no cavity and you have solid external walls, consider cladding them from the inside of the property with internal wall insulation. This is generally best accomplished by fitting rigid insulation boards, which must be done by a professional to ensure they won’t cause damp and condensation.

There are grants available for internal wall insulation for solid walls for qualifying households, in receipt of benefits under the government's ECO scheme. The cost for internal wall insulation is between £50/m2 and £100/m2.

*If you do invest in some of the costlier solutions, such as insulation, this should improve your EPC report and be a selling point if you put your home on the market.

*Check out the ECO, Energy Company Obligation scheme, designed for those on a low income and which can include a new boiler and other energy saving measures. You could be eligible for ECO if you receive benefits .

Tenants in receipt of benefits can also have ECO measures installed, though you have to get consent from your landlord. For more details and eligibility for this contact your energy supplier.

There is also the Great British Insulation Scheme which is open to a further 400,000 households that have an energy performance certificate of D to G and are in Council Tax bands A-D. There are income caps. Visit www.gov.uk/apply-great-british-insulation-scheme or call 0800 098 7950; The EST is at www.energysavingtrust.org.uk.