Two days until the cap rises.
Here is what actually helps.
On Wednesday the price cap goes up 13%. There is a genre of article that will now tell you to bleed your radiators and put a jumper on. This is not that article, because it is July and you are not cold. Here is the short list of things that genuinely move the number.
🧦 Skip the jumper advice
It is July. The heating is off. Nearly all of the standard cost-of-living energy advice is written for January and quietly useless in summer.
What actually drives a July electricity bill is the big intermittent loads: the car, the hot water, the washing, the dishwasher, and in a heatwave, the cooling.
Every one of those can happen at a different hour than it does now, with no reduction in comfort whatsoever.
🕑 Move the load, not the lifestyle
You are not being asked to use less. You are being asked to use the same amount at a different time.
In summer the cheap window has moved to the middle of the day, because of solar. The expensive window is 4pm to 8pm, and it is brutal.
Charging a car at 1pm instead of 6pm does not change a single thing about your life. It changes quite a lot about what you pay.
💰 Then get paid on top
Shifting your usage saves you money. Letting the grid do the shifting earns you money. These are two different things and you can have both.
The grid pays for flexibility because flexibility is genuinely valuable to it. It is cheaper for the country to pay you to move your washing than to fire up a gas peaker.
It works on any tariff, with any supplier, with no switching. The cap still rises on Wednesday. It just matters less.
On Wednesday roughly 24 million households will pay more for electricity. Somewhere between now and then, on a sunny afternoon, the wholesale price will probably go negative again. Both of those sentences are about the same week.