Ofgem confirmed on 27 May 2026 that the energy price cap would rise by 13% for the third quarter of the year, pushing the typical dual-fuel direct debit bill to £1,663 from 1 July. Under the new cap, electricity costs around 26.1p per kWh and gas around 7.3p. Most people register that their bill is going up. Far fewer can say with any confidence which single appliance in the house is actually driving it.
There’s a wrinkle in that price cap figure worth knowing about, too. The headline “typical bill” only rose from £1,641 to £1,663 — a modest 1.3% — despite unit rates themselves climbing by roughly 13%. That’s because Ofgem also revised down its assumption of what a typical household actually uses, cutting the reference figure for electricity to 2,500 kWh a year and gas to 9,500 kWh, reflecting genuinely falling household consumption. The unit price rise is real. The headline bill figure just looks smaller than it otherwise would because the assumed usage baseline shrank alongside it.
Smart meters don’t solve the “which appliance” question on their own. By the end of Q1 2026, there were around 39 million smart meters operating in homes across Great Britain — roughly 72% of the total, according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s quarterly statistics. That’s a useful total, but it’s still just a total. It tells you what the whole house used yesterday, not whether the culprit was the tumble dryer, an old fridge-freezer, or a games console left idling on standby overnight. That gap is exactly what a plug-in energy monitor is built to close.
What an Energy-Monitoring Smart Plug Actually Does
A basic smart plug lets you turn something on or off remotely and set a schedule. That’s useful for lamps and Christmas trees, but it tells you nothing about consumption.
An energy-monitoring smart plug adds a current sensor inside the plug itself. It reports live wattage, tracks kWh used over hours, days or weeks, and — in most apps — lets you enter your unit rate so it can estimate what that specific appliance is costing you in pounds and pence. Move the same plug from the tumble dryer to the router to the fish tank heater over a fortnight and you build a genuinely useful picture of where your money is going, appliance by appliance, rather than guessing from a single monthly figure on a bill.
The Best Options Available in the UK Right Now
TP-Link Tapo P110 — the sensible default
This is the plug most UK smart home reviewers reach for first, and it’s easy to see why. A single Tapo P110 typically costs around £13–15, with four-packs commonly sitting between £30 and £40 depending on the retailer and whatever sale is running that week — Currys, Amazon and TP-Link’s own UK store all stock it.
It needs no separate hub, connects straight to your Wi-Fi, and works natively with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. The Tapo app shows real-time wattage plus daily and monthly totals, and you can set the plug to remember its last power state, stay off, or switch back on automatically after an outage — handy if it’s controlling something like a freezer. Group control lets several plugs respond to one command, which matters once you own more than two or three.
The catch: the standard P110 doesn’t talk to Apple Home. If you’re in an Apple household, look for the near-identical Tapo P110M, which adds Matter support for a few pounds more, bringing in Apple Home and Samsung SmartThings alongside Alexa and Google.
Eve Energy (Matter) — best for Apple Home households
Eve Energy sits at the premium end, usually £35–45 for a single unit in the UK, dropping a little per-plug if you buy a two-pack. What you’re paying for is Matter and Thread support out of the box, meaning it works across Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home and SmartThings without needing separate skills or bridges for each one.
Eve’s own privacy pitch is genuine rather than marketing gloss: there’s no Eve cloud account, and monitoring data is processed locally through the hub you already own. That does mean it isn’t a fully standalone purchase — you need an existing Thread border router or hub for your platform (an Apple TV 4K, HomePod mini, Echo with built-in eero, or a Nest Hub, for example), which is worth checking before you buy. Once set up, the app shows live and historical consumption and lets you punch in your electricity rate for a running cost estimate, and the unit itself is TÜV-certified and rated to 13A/2,900W.
Meross MSS310 / MSS315 — cheapest way to audit a whole house
If you want to test five or six sockets at once rather than rotate one plug around the house, Meross is the value option. The standard Wi-Fi version with energy monitoring (MSS305/MSS310) typically comes in four-packs around £30–33 from retailers like Gadcet and Amazon. The newer MSS315, which adds Matter support for Apple Home and SmartThings, costs more — around £50 for a four-pack.
Meross plugs work locally over your home network even if the internet drops, which some buyers specifically value for reliability. One detail that turns up repeatedly in UK customer reviews: several owners pair them with Home Assistant to schedule high-draw appliances, like an immersion heater, to run only during cheaper electricity windows, reporting worthwhile daily savings from the shift alone rather than from the monitoring itself. It’s a good illustration of what these plugs are actually for — the data doesn’t save you money by sitting in an app, the behaviour change does.
Quick Comparison
| Plug | Typical UK price | Works with | Standout feature |
| TP-Link Tapo P110 | ~£13–15 (single), ~£35–40 (4-pack) | Alexa, Google Home | No hub, reliable app, cheapest genuine monitoring |
| TP-Link Tapo P110M | Slightly above P110 | Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, SmartThings (Matter) | Same as P110 plus Apple Home |
| Eve Energy (Matter) | ~£35–45 (single) | Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings | Local processing, no cloud account, needs existing hub |
| Meross MSS310 | ~£30–33 (4-pack) | Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings | Cheapest way to monitor several sockets at once |
| Meross MSS315 (Matter) | ~£50 (4-pack) | Adds Apple Home via Matter | Multi-room monitoring with wider ecosystem support |
What to Check Before You Buy
All of these are rated to 13A, which works out at just under 3,000W — comfortable for TVs, routers, chargers, games consoles or a fridge-freezer. Manufacturers still tell you to be cautious with continuous high-draw heating appliances like kettles, tumble dryers or space heaters, since running close to the plug’s rated maximum for long stretches generates heat in the plug itself over time. Worth reading the specific product page rather than assuming every plug handles every appliance the same way.
It’s also worth checking whether the app requires a cloud account to function at all, since that determines whether your usage data sits on a manufacturer’s server or stays local to your home network. And check the physical footprint — some smart plugs are bulky enough to block the socket next to them, which matters if you’re plugging one into a double socket behind a sofa.
Why This Matters More With Time-of-Use Tariffs
A few years ago, most households were on a flat rate, so knowing exactly when an appliance drew power mattered less. That’s changing. Several UK suppliers now offer tariffs with cheaper overnight or off-peak rates, and some — like Octopus Energy’s Agile and Cosy tariffs — vary the unit price through the day depending on wholesale conditions. If you’re on one of these, a monitoring plug tells you not just how much a dishwasher or immersion heater costs, but whether it’s worth delaying that cycle by a couple of hours to catch a cheaper window. Without per-appliance data, you’re shifting your whole routine on a guess.
Will One of These Actually Save You Money?
Not by itself. The plug measures; it doesn’t reduce anything on its own. The saving comes from what you do with the number it shows you — unplugging a set-top box that draws 15W on standby around the clock, moving a tumble dryer’s cycle to an off-peak window if you’re on a time-of-use tariff, or finally confirming that the ancient chest freezer in the garage is worth replacing. None of that needs the plug to stay connected forever.
A sensible way to start is with one plug, not a four-pack. Buy a single Tapo P110, move it between your three or four biggest suspects — the tumble dryer, an older fridge-freezer, a desktop PC, an electric heater — over a couple of weeks, and you’ll usually find one clear outlier. That’s the one worth acting on first.