Most advice on this subject is a list of twenty small things presented as though they carry equal weight. They do not. In a typical Oklahoma house a couple of items account for the great majority of the bill, and the rest is rounding. This is ordered by how much difference it makes, which means the honest version starts by saying that much of it is not electrical work at all.
Where the money actually goes
For most houses in this climate the ranking is: cooling first, and by a wide margin; then water heating; then, depending on the house, heating; then large appliances, particularly anything with a heating element or a motor that runs continuously; then everything else together.
Lighting used to be a meaningful share and mostly is not any more, because LED conversion already happened in most houses. Electronics and standby loads are real but small.
The practical implication is uncomfortable for a page on an electrician's site: the biggest wins are in HVAC efficiency and building fabric — insulation, sealing, ductwork, servicing — rather than in wiring. Anyone telling you electrical work will transform your bill is selling something. What electrical work does do is remove faults that waste energy, and enable the equipment that uses less of it.
Cooling, which is where the bill is won or lost
The thermostat setting is the single largest lever, and it is free. Each degree of setback reduces run time, and run time is the whole cost. Setting back while the house is empty is where most of the available saving sits.
Ceiling fans make a higher setting comfortable. This is the one item on this list that is electrical work and genuinely pays, because moving air lets a thermostat sit several degrees higher for the same comfort, and that directly reduces compressor run time — the largest load in the house. A fan uses a tiny fraction of what a compressor does. The caveat is that fans cool people, not rooms, so running them in empty rooms is pure waste. Fan installation is mostly about whether the ceiling box is rated to carry one.
Service the air conditioning. A dirty coil, a blocked filter or a low charge makes the compressor work harder for the same cooling. HVAC work rather than electrical, and the most direct improvement available to the biggest load.
Duct leakage and attic insulation. Cooled air lost into an attic is paid for and never used. In this climate it is frequently the largest single inefficiency in a house, and it is building work.
Shade and window film on west-facing glass. Unglamorous and effective, because it reduces the heat gain the system is fighting in the afternoon rather than fighting it more efficiently.
Water heating, the quiet second
Usually the second largest item, and it runs all year rather than seasonally. The effective measures are lowering the thermostat to a sensible setting, insulating the tank and the first run of pipe, and fixing hot water leaks, which are a continuous cost.
Heat pump water heaters use substantially less energy than resistance elements, and tankless removes standby loss. Both are worth considering at replacement time rather than as an early upgrade — and both are cases where the electrical question comes first, because a heat pump unit or an electric tankless has particular circuit and capacity requirements. Electric tankless in particular can demand a great deal of a service, and it is a common reason a house discovers it needs more capacity than it has.
Lighting, which is a one-time job
If any incandescent or halogen lamps remain, replacing them with LED is worthwhile and quick. The saving per lamp is large in percentage terms, and LEDs also produce far less heat, which marginally reduces cooling load.
The reason it is not higher up this list is that most houses have already done it, so for most readers this is finished. Where it still pays is in the places people forget: outdoor and security lighting that runs all night, garage and closet fittings, and older recessed or fluorescent fittings. Outdoor lighting is also where a timer or photocell pays for itself, since the load runs for hours unattended — see outdoor lighting and controls.
Standby loads, without exaggeration
Devices drawing power while idle are real. Set-top boxes, older game consoles, always-on computers and networking equipment are the meaningful ones; the notorious phone charger left plugged in is negligible.
Switching off a cluster of entertainment equipment at a strip is worth doing and will not transform a bill. It is included here mainly to keep it in proportion, because it receives attention out of all relation to its size — a household that eliminates every standby load and leaves the thermostat where it was has made a rounding-error saving.
Things that are mostly marketing
Plug-in energy saver or power factor correction boxes. These are sold heavily and do not reduce a residential bill. Homes are billed for real energy, not for the reactive component these claim to correct, so there is nothing for the device to save. Treat any product promising a large percentage reduction from being plugged into an outlet as what it is.
Whole-house voltage optimisation for a typical home. Marketed on the idea that reducing supply voltage saves energy. For resistive loads it reduces output along with consumption, and modern electronics and inverter-driven appliances simply draw the same power at lower voltage. Not a residential win.
Unplugging everything obsessively. See above on proportion. Effort is better spent on the thermostat.
Replacing working appliances purely for efficiency. The arithmetic rarely works before the end of the existing appliance's life. Efficiency is a factor when replacing something that has failed, not usually a reason to replace it early. Refrigerators more than about twenty years old are the main exception.
When a high bill is actually a fault
This is the part of the subject an electrician can genuinely speak to, and it is worth checking before spending on efficiency measures. A bill that has jumped with no change in how the house is used is a different problem from a bill that is simply high.
The candidates: a water heater element that has failed in a way that leaves it heating continuously; a well pump or sump pump short-cycling; a compressor struggling and drawing more than it should; a heating element or motor drawing high current as it fails. Any of these can add a great deal without being obvious.
There is also a genuine safety dimension. Current going somewhere it should not — a leakage fault — is energy paid for and wasted, and it is the same condition ground-fault protection exists to catch. A bill that has risen alongside a GFCI that has started tripping, or alongside breakers tripping more than they used to, is worth investigating as a fault rather than as consumption.
What an electrician can and cannot influence
Honestly: we cannot make a poorly insulated house with an old air conditioner cheap to run. That is HVAC and building fabric, and any electrician claiming otherwise is overreaching.
What is genuinely electrical work: measuring what individual circuits actually draw, which turns a guess about where the energy goes into a fact; finding faults and leakage that waste energy continuously; fitting ceiling fans so a thermostat can sit higher; installing controls and timers on lighting that runs unattended; and providing the circuits and capacity that efficient equipment — heat pump water heaters, variable-speed HVAC, electric tankless — needs.
If your bill has changed sharply rather than being steadily high, start with diagnosis. If you want to know where the consumption actually is before spending anything, a home energy audit is the tool designed for that, and it will tell you honestly how much of your answer is electrical.