Free electricity on Christmas Day FAQs

We know households are feeling the pinch, so we're offering to pay you back for your Christmas Day electricity between 8am to 4pm.

It's just one of the ways we're looking to put more cash back into your pocket.

All you have to do is sign up to Power Hours after connecting your smart meter - or, if you're already signed up to Power Hours before December, activate the offer by 21 December.

We'll remind you before the big day and you'll get your earnings through in January.

Anyone with a compatible electricity smart meter can sign up, regardless of which energy provider you're with.

No, you don't need to switch any providers to take part. All you need to do is download the Uswitch app, connect your compatible smart meter and sign up for Power Hours – our free, app-exclusive energy earning scheme.

Once Christmas Day is over, we'll try our best to calculate your results at the beginning of January. This gives us time to gather smart meter data and calculate earnings. If there’s a delay retrieving your smart meter data, this may take longer.

Sometimes there are technical issues which mean we can't receive your smart meter data for certain time periods. When this happens, we'll do what we can to try and retrieve them, but your calculations may take several weeks. If we can't retrieve sufficient smart meter readings or energy plan data for your account, we'll use the average earnings to calculate your total instead.

You can earn a maximum of £10 across eight hours on Christmas Day. That should be more than enough to cover all the laundry and cooking you choose to do during that time frame. Any amount used during the eight hours that goes over the £10 limit will not be paid back in your earnings.

Earnings will be calculated in the weeks following Christmas Day. Those earnings will be made available once they've been calculated in January, to then be withdrawn in the Earn tab in the Uswitch app.

Yes, this offer won't change your supplier's energy bill. Instead, think of it as a refund from Uswitch for the electricity you used. You'll earn cash in our app that you can withdraw to your bank account, which means you will still have to pay your supplier for the electricity used during your chosen times.

We use the kWh usage data from your smart meter to calculate how much you’ve used in your chosen time slot. Then pair that with the unit rates from the electricity plan you confirmed with us to calculate your earnings.

Make sure the right plan details are shown on the app to get accurate earnings. We’ll add any calculated earnings to your total, ready to withdraw from the Uswitch app after results have been calculated in January.

We're constantly working on and improving the app. Since Power Hours and free electricity on Christmas Day is a newer offering, we've updated its method of calculating in a way that's more accurate than the energy insights graph in the Utrack tab - but haven't yet updated the calculation method for the graph. Therefore, the numbers might be slightly different based on the date and time that the individual results are produced. However, whatever results you receive for Christmas Day earnings are final.

Unfortunately we rely on energy suppliers to share their energy plan rates with us to use when calculating the cost of your energy consumption. Often energy suppliers do not share details for their less typical plans, such as time-of-use tariffs, EV tariffs or tracker tariffs.

If you can't find your plan in the dropdown list, select 'My plan isn't listed'. This will then default you to the Standard Variable Tariff for your supplier and we will use those unit rates to calculate the cost of your usage.

We understand that this might be frustrating, but we'd rather customers were still able to participate in our free electricity events at slightly different unit rates than miss out completely. Please note we are constantly working with energy suppliers to provide us with more energy plan information so we can better support these types of plans in future.

This ensures we calculate the correct earnings based on your current energy plan.

We use the kWh usage data from your smart meter to calculate how much you’ve used during 8am to 4pm on Christmas Day. Then pair that with the unit rates from your electricity plan to calculate your earnings.

Plans that haven't been confirmed before 25 December will default to the plan we have listed. If there is no available plan we will default you to the Standard Variable Tariff for your supplier, or to the average Ofgem price cap in the absence of supplier, and will use those unit rates to calculate the cost of your usage.

Yes, this offer won't change your supplier's energy bill. Instead, think of it as a refund from Uswitch for the electricity you used. You'll earn cash in our app that you can withdraw to your bank account, which means you will still have to pay your supplier for the electricity used during your chosen times.

We use the kWh usage data from your smart meter to calculate how much you’ve used in your chosen time slot. Then pair that with the unit rates from the electricity plan you confirmed with us to calculate your earnings.

Make sure the right plan details are shown on the app to get accurate earnings. We’ll add any calculated earnings to your total, ready to withdraw from the Uswitch app in December.

Yes, you can be enrolled in free electricity on Christmas Day - and other campaigns through Power Hours - while also being enrolled in an energy saving scheme with another provider.

However, when you sign up to Power Hours, you'll be automatically enrolled in our Reduce and Earn sessions, which are a part of the NESO Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) scheme.

You can only be registered with one NESO DFS scheme at a time. If you’re enrolled in multiple NESO DFS schemes when a session takes place, there's a chance you'll be disqualified from earning money in both until you have opted out of all but one.

Once you opt out of your other scheme, you should be able to rejoin Reduce and Earn sessions by the next day.

You'll find a link to opt out of the offer on the free electricity on Christmas Day screen in the Uswitch app.