Why Irish Households Overpay on Energy Every Year (And How to Stop)

When you sign up with a new energy provider, you usually get a discount for the first 12 months. It's a good deal. The problem is what happens after that.

When the year is up, your discount quietly expires and you roll onto the provider's standard rate. Nobody calls to tell you. There's no warning on your bill. Your direct debit just goes up.

Energy companies count on this. It's sometimes called the loyalty tax: the longer you stay without switching, the more you pay. New customers get the best rates. Existing ones pay the standard rate, which is almost always higher.

It's not that people don't care about saving money. It's that switching never feels urgent enough to act on right now.

Comparison sites exist, but using them takes time. You need to find your MPRN, estimate your usage, work out which tariff is actually cheapest after discounts, and then remember to do the whole thing again next year.

Most people think about switching when the bill arrives, decide to deal with it later, and then forget about it entirely until the next bill. Repeat for two or three years and you've left a lot of money on the table.

For a typical Irish household on a standard variable rate, the gap between what they're paying and what they could be paying is usually somewhere between €150 and €400 a year on electricity alone.

Add gas to the picture and that figure climbs. The Irish Independent reported that some households have saved over €800 a year by switching. That's not an outlier number reserved for big homes. It's the result of sitting on an expired discount for a couple of years without noticing.

The savings are real. They're just sitting there unclaimed because the process of finding them is friction-heavy and forgettable.

Manual comparison sites are useful, but they only work if you remember to use them. And most people don't, at least not consistently.

The typical pattern is: switch, get a good deal, forget about it, sit on the standard rate for 18 months, switch again. That gap in the middle is expensive.

What's needed isn't a better comparison site. It's something that watches your bills in the background and tells you when it's worth acting on.

This is what Sortd does. You add your current energy details once and Sortd monitors the market on your behalf. When a better deal appears, or when your current discount is about to expire, it lets you know.

You don't need to remember to check. You don't need to visit a comparison site every few months. Sortd does the watching and only surfaces something when it's actually worth your attention.

Nothing switches without you saying yes. The point isn't to automate the switching. It's to make sure you never miss a saving because life got in the way.