8 ways to reduce your POWER BILLS

With power costs on the rise and warnings to prepare for even more price hikes, this is an issue that's not going away.

- Samantha Ireland

We're not completely at the mercy of energy companies, though. There are things we can do to reduce those bills.

COMPARE PLANS

Trying to choose the right energy plan can be confusing and time consuming, and you don't want to end up worse off. Thankfully, there's a 'Switch to Save' section on the government website energy.go au where you can compare the price of energy providers in your area.

Community Facebook pages can also be a great place to ask others if they've found a good deal.

MAKE USE OF APPS

Ask your energy provider if they have an app you can download to your phone.

On ours I can see that yesterday our electricity usage spiked at 8am while running the dishwasher and washing machine, and at 6pm when I cooked dinner.

It tells me our usage cost for the day was $6.05 and we generated $3.86 in solar, so our total cost was $2.18.