Compare your bills with similar households

DECC has just published a spreadsheet based tool that tells you average electricity and gas bills for households with different characteristics - you can select any two from property type, size (floor area), number of bedrooms, age, tenure (owner, private rent or councils/housing association), income and region. You can use this to find how your bills compare to similar houses. The spreadsheet comes with just a table but you can easily add in charts to make it more interesting. The only thing the tool is not good for is spotting year on year trends - you can only select one year at a time.

This is based on a large dataset called NEED (National Energy Efficiency Database). I had fun with this last December for 'Factors driving your energy bills up and down'.