How to reduce Sky bills to £0 with dish trick and save £420

It's one of the most popular TV and broadband providers in the country, and people up and down the UK subscribe to Sky for its TV packages, Sky Atlantic, Sky Sports Premier League coverage and its many other channels. But if you're not watching live sports or the latest films, many people are only now realising that you can get hundreds of channels, including some services included on Sky, for free with no subscription by plugging a cable into the back of your TV instead.

Many households across the UK have a satellite dish on the side of their house or roof, even if the house's current owners don't have a Sky TV subscription. That's because many properties have had dishes installed for Sky at some point over the years by one of their previous owners, and then not bothered to uninstall it and take it with them when they sell up.

And others may already have a Sky subscription and a dish and be thinking about leaving to save some money.

According to Sky's website, the cheapest Sky TV and broadband package starts at £35 a month (£420 a year). However, you could save all of that money by using Freesat with your existing Sky dish instead.

And a lot of people are still only just realising they can get Freesat for free. Many smart TVs now come with a Freesat tuner as well as Freeview, so you don't even need to buy a box to get Freesat necessarily - simply plug a satellite cable from your Sky point in the wall straight into the back of your TV if it has a SAT connection on the back (which looks a bit like a hexagonal bolt shape with a tiny hole in the middle).

Then you just go into your TV's menu and tell it to scan for satellite channels. It will immediately pick up a raft of channels, including some normally only on Sky and not Freeview.

As the Freesat website explains: "To use Freesat you need a satellite dish, but it doesn't need to be new!

"Even if it's a Sky satellite dish or an older model, all you need to do is plug the satellite cables into the back of your Freesat 4K TV Box [or some smart TVs] and you're good to go.

"If you're thinking about moving from Sky TV to Freesat you can use the same satellite dish! The dish you have will affect how many channels you can record at once on your 4K TV Box."

The current list of Freesat channels lists over 100 right now, including channels not available on Freeview, such as ITV2 HD, ITV3 HD, ITV Be HD, PBS America, Quest HD, Court TV, and lots of other channels like W, Drama, Yesterday, Sky Mix HD, Challenge, Sky Arts and E4 Extra.

People using Reddit have only just discovered this recently - and it can even work with Sky Q dishes if you buy a new box.

@vamprybyte said: "A fair chunk of TVs include a satellite tuner, known as DVB-S2, just like they have a free view tuner (DVB-T). So you can probably get the open freesat channels without buying anything if you are already on Sky and getting away from it."

And @antde5 said: "The new Sky Q setup works 100% fine with the 4K freesat box available on the market now. It's literally what I ran for the past 12 months after I dumped sky.

"I've just switched back to sky, and we just plugged the Q box into the cables and it was fine."

Of course, in the age of streaming many people aren't bothering to hook up aerials or dishes, but the advantage of Freesat is being able to record and rewind without restrictions, while also not using up any internet bandwidth - no chugging streams while you're downloading something in the background.