Utility's - Gas and Electric

antdad

antdad

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10,991
I've been with the same company for about 6 years now and thoroughly recommend them...No BS standing charges, split tarrif or daft incentives. I I don't do monthly DD just pay for what I use, every quarter.

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I hate those comparison web sites, who's on a killer tarrif I should know about?
 
I spent over 15 years in the Electricity Supply Industry; it's a shambles. The companies are all as bad as each other, in my opinion. The experienced staff were pensioned off and replaced by low cost substitutes.

My informal advice would be to stay with whoever you are with, you will not win in the medium/long term by changing. You will be dealing with disinterested, de-motivated (but generally decent) staff in huge call centres. The staff turnover was and probably still is huge! The horrors involved in changing, as they will try every trick in the book to keep you, can and probably will be your worst nightmare.

Bitter, moi? No, simply glad to be out of it all.
 
I take it all back...I will take Blyth's advice and stay put. :? HM, you are a lucky sausage if you are paying the same rate as four years ago.

Ebico have been a pleasure to deal with and after moving my elderly mother to them from BG, I moved my own supply to them with no regrets, crystal clear billing and if you like the idea of a spreading the cost throughout the year, they do that too. I've tested some of the energy supply comparison sites and they seem to be very "prone to influence" depending on cash back offers and incentive schemes, it's a shark pool.
 
antdad said:
I take it all back...I will take Blyth's advice and stay put. :? HM, you are a lucky sausage if you are paying the same rate as four years ago.
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I know - that's why I don't rock the boat by complaining about getting 3 copies of everything they send out (including the 3 lots of light bulbs from both gas and electric sides of the same business)
 
We had a guy from EDF Energy turn up at our door last night. He tried to persuade us to migrate from Scottish Power, somehow knowing that we'd save over £100 a year. Unfortunately I have to take this on trust as there is actually no easy way of knowing, once we've swapped over, what our saving will have been. If I keep records of our electricity usage and calculate what it would have cost us do you think I'd get any kind of refund if this guy was wrong?? I doubt it, and I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle. I agree that it's 'better the devil you know', as we've had no problems with SP in the last few years so it's probably better not to rock the boat.

It is sad how this deregulation (if that's the right word) actually seems to have made things worse for the consumer, not better. :cry:
 
As usual with deregulated industries it ends up being a race for the bottom...

When the buses were deregulated in 1985, almost instantly there were 30+ year old buses on the road (where I used to live there was this company that was running buses with petrol engines from the late 1940s :eek: ), they stopped interfacing with the local rail & metro network so instead of there being very few buses in the city centre there were 4 buses per passenger... if you look now there are a lot of buses built in the mid-1980s still on the road - and I don't care how well looked after they are, they're still 25 years old belching out obscene amounts of crap.

I get the same impression of the telecoms industry in general - having worked "with" it for the last 10 or so years - every time I see a BT van anywhere between my house and phone exchange, I get concerned - mostly because at work you'd see one up the top of the road and know that it was evens that we'd lose the phones and data connections. Not exclusively a problem with BT either - Cable & Sackless, CLOT & others are just as useless... although BT did take my cost analysis away when I proposed moving all our traffic from them to a pair of other providers... I calculated a 53% saving, they said I'd arse up the figures and in fact it was 55% :lol: None of them can handle billing properly (a ~£1m phone bill went unpaid because they couldn't provide the required itemisation - eventually I got a paper bill for the £1m - itemised - took me ages to get it scanned in so I could analyse it in Access)
 
These companies compete, they don't undercut. They buy from the same pool and any organisational efficiencies they can make go in profit to (largely foreign) ownership.

Any real or perceived 'savings' by the consumer will be minimal - they have to be given their business models - if you are getting a hassle free service sit tight.
 
Just one thing...If you are cold called to change your supply tell them nothing, nowt, zippo about yourself or your supplier or just make it up. The information they garner is valuable to them even if they don't get you to sign up.

I used to get cold called a few times a year if not more, they tell me that my current supplier X costs so much more and I can save so much. I nod my head sagely and say that I'm satisfied with my supplier at the moment knowing full well that I falsely told them I was supplied by X quite a few years ago.
 
Pig Cat said:
We had a guy from EDF Energy turn up at our door last night. He tried to persuade us to migrate from Scottish Power, somehow knowing that we'd save over £100 a year. Unfortunately I have to take this on trust as there is actually no easy way of knowing, once we've swapped over, what our saving will have been. If I keep records of our electricity usage and calculate what it would have cost us do you think I'd get any kind of refund if this guy was wrong?? I doubt it, and I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle. I agree that it's 'better the devil you know', as we've had no problems with SP in the last few years so it's probably better not to rock the boat.

It is sad how this deregulation (if that's the right word) actually seems to have made things worse for the consumer, not better. :cry:
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Hi Pig Cat,

Couldn't you tell that it would have been cheaper by comparing tariffs? (is that the right English word). You're paying for gas and electricity and they both have tariffs.

Overhere in Holland energy companies are also trying to steal clients away from other companies. They have special action tariffs especially last year when the oil price came down again. We also have different pricing for one year fixed, 3 year fixed and variable. Its almost like the interest on a mortgage!

I'm curious what you guys pay for energy. Or electric and gas bill is about € 200 per month. Water is about € 125 per quarter although they have some other services mixed in.

Nye,

Eric
 
TuttoItaliaOnline said:
Hi Pig Cat,

Couldn't you tell that it would have been cheaper by comparing tariffs? (is that the right English word). You're paying for gas and electricity and they both have tariffs.
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It wasn't that easy. I went paperless for my billing quite some time ago, so I tried to look online to see which tariff I'm on while the bloke was here. I couldn't find it anywhere. My guess is that Scottish Power don't make it readily available to view to prevent easy comparisons being made.

I also get the impression (I may be wrong) that unless you're on a fixed tariff the price you pay can be changed by the electricity company. If I do change to EDF, it is quite possible that they may raise their prices and my savings disappear. The figure of £100 quoted (or guessed?) by the salesman is tempting, but for the sake of less than £10/month I think I'd rather do without any potential hazard. I'd only blow my saving on Palmolive anyway!!
 
I hate it when they arrive and say that. They don't know who supplies me, or what deal I have or crucially how much I use.

More than once I've had someone say I can save you "hundreds of pounds" (at the time I was working 5 days a week in Belgium and only home weekends, so consumption was epically low) so as he started on with his spiel, I cut him off and said "wait, when you say hundreds of pounds, I take that to be more than one hundred, let's assume you mean two hundreds.... show me the contract that says you'll cut my existing bill by £200" he was perplexed... so I said to him, "look, my current annual bill is £180 - if you're going to save me hundreds - you'll be giving me £20 - are you going to sign up a customer on that basis?" He walked off defeated.

I despise all door-knockers and hope their cocks rot agonisingly.
 
TuttoItaliaOnline said:
I'm curious what you guys pay for energy. Or electric and gas bill is about € 200 per month. Water is about € 125 per quarter although they have some other services mixed in.
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I can believe that the woman next door but one to me pays £200 a month for her electric - she has a security light (that's at least 500W) and it's been on night and day for the last 3 weeks at least... so she's burning at least 252kWh of electric a month... on top of that from sunset there is not a room in her house that is not lit - it's completely mad.

For me - electric & gas combined are £80/mo - water is a sore point as it's linked to the council-perceived value of your house - they seem to think my modest 3 bedroom house is only 2 bands down from Floors Castle (I can see the council tax banding of the castle at the local library...)

floors_castle.jpg
- so I get to pay about £500 a year... although it is all the water I can suck out of the main :D (A Scottish Water man told me "dinnae worry aboot it, Scotland's got plenty o' water" - consequently I've been thinking of using the garden tap to run a micro hydro scheme :ugeek: )
 
antdad said:
Just one thing...If you are cold called to change your supply tell them nothing, nowt, zippo about yourself or your supplier or just make it up. The information they garner is valuable to them even if they don't get you to sign up.

I used to get cold called a few times a year if not more, they tell me that my current supplier X costs so much more and I can save so much. I nod my head sagely and say that I'm satisfied with my supplier at the moment knowing full well that I falsely told them I was supplied by X quite a few years ago.
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I have great fun with cold callers. If its a survey I ask them how much they'll pay me for my information. I've accussed them of being friends making a prank call and having a conversation with that friend "so how is your Auntie Mary" "Sorry Sir I'm John calling from ..."

I always try to start conversations with Indians , "so whats the weather like there ?" "Is that your real name ? " and so on.

Some I do get really annoyed with I got one a few days ago looking for a charitable donation to Haiti from some organisation I'd never heard of , vultures.
 
Seems high Eric, I'd say the average UK household pays half of that at least.

This is my tariff....

Gas = 3.675p per Kw/h Elec = 13.40p per Kw/h Flat rate inclusive of VAT.


Water is metered and I pay about £350 - £400 p/A
 
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