Your electricity bill charges 365 days even when you are away

Your electricity bill has two halves and only one of them depends on what you do. The first is energy: the kilowatt hours you use, at so much per kilowatt hour. The second is capacity: the kilowatts you have contracted — how many appliances you can run at the same time — and that is charged for every day of the year, whether you are at home or on holiday.

Do the arithmetic. With a capacity charge of around 0.11 euros per kilowatt per day, a home with 4.6 contracted kilowatts pays about 0.50 euros a day before switching anything on: some 15 euros a month, around 185 a year. A month away, everything unplugged, still costs those 15 euros.

Almost nobody chose their contracted capacity: it is inherited from the previous contract or from whatever the builder installed. Since June 2021 two different capacities are contracted, one for peak hours and one for the rest, and you can only lower it once every twelve months.

Take your last bill and look for the line that says "capacity": your kilowatts are there. If the main breaker — the switch that trips when you ask for too much — has never gone with the oven, the hob and the washing machine all running, you have kilowatts to spare and you are paying for them 365 days a year.