Household energy prices in Great Britain are on course for another punishing increase. The Ofgem price cap, which already rose 4% on Thursday to £1,723 for a typical dual-fuel bill, is forecast by Cornwall Insight to climb a further 16% to £1,999 in January. That £276 jump lands on roughly 20 million households sitting on variable tariffs — the default position for most consumers. The most immediate defence is switching. There are currently 34 fixed deals priced below the January forecast, with the cheapest — Fuse Energy's 12-month fix at £1,675 — beating October's cap by £48 and potentially January's by £324. Richard Neudegg of Uswitch calls switching 'the biggest lever households on the price cap can pull.' He's right in the short term, but the framing deserves scrutiny: the lever exists because the default position is bad, not because the market is working well for passive consumers. The practical efficiency measures are real and worth cataloguing. Turning down a combi boiler's flow temperature from 70-80°C to 60°C saves about £60 a year and takes minutes. Draught-proofing strips around windows and doors save roughly £25. Dropping the thermostat by 1°C — the World Health Organization considers 18-21°C comfortable — saves about £120. Using thermostatic radiator valves properly saves another £40. Adding an 80mm jacket to an under-insulated hot water tank saves £45 for a £20 outlay. These are not trivial sums when stacked. Insulation is where the savings scale up but so do the barriers. Topping up loft insulation from 120mm to 270mm saves roughly £20 a year — modest relative to the effort. Cavity wall insulation, however, can save £200 a year, though it requires professional installation and upfront capital that many households lack. The gap between knowing what works and being able to afford it is the central tension the article surfaces without quite naming. The heat pump pathway illustrates the same problem at larger scale. The government's boiler upgrade scheme offers £7,500 grants (£9,000 for off-grid homes) toward air-to-water or ground-to-water systems. Scotland offers interest-free loans and grants through Home Energy Scotland. The Energy Saving Trust says the real savings materialise when heat pump owners move to time-of-use tariffs — about £330 a year — rising to £800 with solar panels added. But electricity remains more expensive per unit than gas on standard tariffs, meaning the wrong tariff can negate efficiency gains entirely. What emerges from the detail is a system that places the burden of optimisation squarely on individual households. Every saving requires knowledge, time, or capital — often all three. The 20 million households on default variable tariffs aren't there because they chose badly; they're there because the default is designed to extract. The practical advice is sound and worth acting on. The structural question — why the floor keeps rising — goes unanswered. The forecast trajectory is clear: energy costs are being managed through household behaviour change and one-off grants rather than through the systemic decarbonisation and grid reform that would structurally lower the floor. That's a political choice disguised as a market outcome.
