Your meter already knows exactly when your kitchen fridge compressor kicks in, when
your ovens hit peak load, and when your empty units are quietly burning electricity
overnight. Your bill just doesn’t tell you any of that.
That’s about to change for good. Great Britain’s electricity market is moving to Market-
Wide Half-Hourly Settlement, with all business electricity meters expected to move to
half-hourly settlement by October 2026. For hospitality and retail SMEs, that’s a bigger
deal than it sounds.
What Half-Hourly Data Actually Is
A half-hourly (HH) meter records your electricity use in 48 separate 30-minute blocks
every single day, rather than lumping weeks of usage into one estimated total. Every
block gets sent automatically to your supplier.
That means your bill is no longer built on a guess. It’s built on exactly what happened,
hour by hour, in your kitchen, your walk-in fridge, your dining room lighting, your back-
office equipment.
• Estimated bills based on rough annual averages
• Manual meter reads that happen once every few months
• Flat “typical usage” assumptions baked into your tariff
Half-hourly data replaces all three with a live, granular picture of what your site actually
does.
Why This Matters More for Hospitality and Retail
Most hospitality and retail sites have sharply “peaky” usage. A busy Friday dinner
service looks nothing like a quiet Tuesday afternoon, and your bill has never been able
to tell the difference.
Half-hourly data changes that. It shows you exactly when your energy costs the most,
when equipment runs even though nobody’s using it, and where a simple change in
timing could cut real cost.
The Decision This Data Actually Unlocks
Once you can see your consumption by half-hour block, questions your bill never let
you ask start becoming answerable: is overnight refrigeration load unusually high, is
equipment left running through closed periods, and does your contract’s time-of-use
structure actually match how your business runs.
What This Means for Your Business
Most SME operators are too busy running the business to sit down and decode 48 data
points a day, every day. That’s the real problem, not a lack of information but a lack of
time to translate it into a decision.
That is exactly the gap disruptmyenergybill was built to close, turning raw half-hourly
consumption data into plain-English insight, so operators can see where they’re
overpaying and where their contract no longer fits how they actually use energy.
Get Your Own Half-Hourly Picture
Curious what your own meter already knows about your bill? Run our free calculator, it
takes just 60 seconds, and see what your consumption data reveals about how much
you could save.
