Guides

How much can you actually save by shifting appliance cycles?

Last updated: 10 August 2026

Energy advice loves vague promises, so let's do actual arithmetic instead. Below is a worked example of what moving three everyday appliances out of the Agile evening peak saves over a year — with every assumption on the table, and the caveats stated as plainly as the wins.

The assumptions

Prices bounce around daily and differ by region, so we'll use one illustrative day and say so: an evening peak of 35p/kWh (roughly 4–7pm) and an overnight trough of 10p/kWh. Some days the gap is smaller; on others the trough is 5p, or below zero, and winter peaks can run far higher — Agile caps out at 100p/kWh. A 25p gap is a fair everyday picture, not a best case.

Typical per-cycle energy, from the appliance guides:

A year in a real household

Take a family running five washes, seven dishwasher cycles and three dryer loads a week, all shifted from the peak to the trough:

• Washing machine: 5 × 20p × 52 weeks ≈ £52/year
• Dishwasher: 7 × 30p × 52 weeks ≈ £109/year
• Tumble dryer: 3 × £1.00 × 52 weeks ≈ £156/year

Around £300 a year, from pressing delay buttons. A one-person flat with a heat pump dryer and three loads a week of everything lands nearer £80; a big family washing hot and drying daily can beat £400. And notice the shape of the table: the tumble dryer is half the total — if the delay-button habit only sticks for one appliance, make it that one.

The honest caveats

• Nobody starts from 100% peak. The £300 assumes every cycle would otherwise have run at the worst moment. Real habits are messier — if your washes already run at random times, shifting them to the trough saves the gap from average to trough instead: smaller, but still real, typically half the headline.
• You won't hit the perfect half hour every time — delay timers step in whole hours or fixed options, and life intervenes. Scoring the settings the machine actually offers (which is what Cheap Hours does) gets you most of the theoretical saving; guesswork gets you less.
• The standing charge doesn't move. Shifting changes the unit-rate part of the bill only.
• Appliances aren't the whole bill. Heating, hot water, EV charging and always-on devices dwarf appliance cycles in many homes. That cuts both ways: the same peak-avoidance thinking applied to an EV charger or immersion heater saves multiples of the numbers above.

Where the arithmetic stops mattering

The gap between a careful spreadsheet and a good-enough habit is smaller than the gap between a good-enough habit and nothing. The whole strategy is: stack the machine in the evening, glance at one recommendation, press the delay button. Cheap Hours exists to make that glance take five seconds — it shows the exact saving for each recommendation, on that day's real prices, so you never have to take a guide's illustrative numbers (including ours) on faith.

Keep reading

• Appliance delay timers explained — turning a cheap window into the right button press
• Octopus Agile explained — where these prices come from
• Plunge pricing — the days the numbers go negative