Home · Personal · Money & Tax · Insurance & utilities

YES

As of 13 August 2026, AI can calculate your household energy usage.

Most people should do this themselves; the prompt is on this page.

Can you do it?

5 minutesto a draft.

15 minutesto something you’d act on.

Cost, all in£0

Skill needednone

Who has to check ityou

What the alternative costsThe available tool data does not give a price for a human or spreadsheet-based alternative.

If this goes wrong: a wrong reading, unit or tariff detail produces a wrong total, which you can usually find by comparing the calculation with the original bill and meter records.

What to actually do

  1. Do it yourself

    The route this page recommends

    A chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 15 minutes until you can act on the result.

    How to actually do it

    1. Open your latest electricity and gas bills or supplier account and gather the meter readings, reading dates, units, actual or estimated labels and the billing-period dates.
    2. Copy the relevant figures into a plain document, keeping electricity and gas in separate sections and removing your account number, full address and payment details.
    3. Paste the supplied prompt into a chatbot, replace the bracketed slots with your readings and bill information, and send it without filling gaps with estimates.
    4. Ask the chatbot to produce the period table and summary, including separate usage totals for electricity and gas and a separate cost calculation if tariff details were supplied.
    5. Check every subtraction against the opening and closing readings you gathered, then compare the resulting usage totals with the usage figures printed on the corresponding supplier bills.
    6. Correct any unit, date or estimated-reading warning using the original bill or meter display, rerun the calculation, and save the final checked table for your records.

    Prompt

    Calculate my household energy usage from the data below. Use only the figures I provide and do not guess missing readings, dates, units, meter conversions or tariff details. Keep electricity and gas separate. For each period, show the opening reading, closing reading, unit, dates, subtraction and usage total. Mark any reading labelled estimated, flag gaps or inconsistencies, and say exactly what I need to provide to resolve them. If I provide a gas reading in cubic metres, keep it in cubic metres unless I provide a valid conversion basis. If I provide tariff information, calculate the estimated energy charge and standing charge separately, showing the formula and stating which figures are missing. Do not present an estimated cost as an actual supplier bill. Finish with a plain summary of total usage for each fuel and a short list of checks I should make against my bill.

My data:
[Paste meter readings, dates, units and actual or estimated labels here]
[Paste relevant bill usage figures and tariff details here, if needed]

    Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

  2. Use a tool built for this

    Second choice

  3. Hand it to a person

    The distant third

    A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

What it gets wrong

  • AI cannot read your meter or access your supplier account, so it depends on the readings and bills you provide.
  • AI cannot know whether a reading is accurate, estimated or entered against the wrong meter unless the source document makes that clear.
  • AI cannot determine a missing tariff, standing charge or gas conversion basis without the relevant supplier information.
  • AI cannot identify a faulty meter or prove that a supplier bill is wrong from arithmetic alone.

Even on a YES, the friction has a name: context depth.

How we scored this

Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.

AxisScore (0–2)
Output2
Inputs2
Verification2
Liability2
Effort delta2
Total10 / 10

The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.

FAQ

Can AI calculate my electricity usage?
Yes. Give it dated opening and closing meter readings in kWh and ask it to show the subtraction and total. Check the result against the usage figure on your electricity bill.
Can AI calculate my gas usage?
Yes, if you provide the dated readings and their units. Keep cubic metre readings separate from kWh readings unless you have the conversion basis supplied by your energy provider, and check the result against your gas bill.
Can AI calculate my energy bill from meter readings?
It can estimate the charge when you provide the unit rate, standing charge, billing dates and any relevant gas conversion information. It cannot reproduce an actual supplier bill reliably from meter readings alone, so compare its calculation with the bill and do not treat an estimate as a final amount.
Is it safe to give AI my energy bills?
Remove your account number, full address, payment details and any information that is not needed for the calculation. The readings, dates, units and tariff details are normally enough for this task, but the chatbot still receives anything you paste into it.

Nearby answers

All Insurance & utilities rulings

Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.

The newsletter

AI news, new answers and product picks, straight to your inbox.