Energy Prices (Strictly NO referrals!)

McPhee said:
Personally, I would leave it as the mistake is now in your favour. Make sure you have a record to show that you've attempted to get the bill corrected. I believe (but check the details) that you will fall under OFGEM's 12 month back-billing policy, so if they don't resolve the problem shortly then it'll be them that are out of pocket.
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I've given up getting in touch with them at this rate.

Just as long as I continue to pay a high direct debit it'll eventually work it way out.
 
Puzzled said:
How does the energy unit price work out at the moment, are you able to switch enough usage to the cheap night period to make it cheaper on average than the SVR cap?

Edit:

Had a look and I'm finding it hard to see why the agile tariff makes sense at the moment. Even the cheap times look more expensive than the SVR?

www.energy-stats.uk

Octopus Agile East Midlands | Energy Stats UK

View historical tariff data for Octopus Agile East Midlands back to 2018. Claim £50 of free credit when joining Octopus Energy.
www.energy-stats.uk www.energy-stats.uk
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Traditionally agile was good because it was able to track cheaper wholesale costs and I think it has some benefits when you have solar panels.

However the reason I switched to it, is its not a basic tracker, it has a upper limit, and that limit is lower than all of the fixed that Octopus have been offering, way lower. Having a 35p unit rate in October will be a good deal, in addition its SC is less than half the SC of SVR. The fact the unit rate can go down and it will occasionally but not often is just a bonus at this point.

Gas tracker is similar but not as good, as the SC is still the same as all other tariffs, but the 11p cap rate will be very likely below the SVR rate on October. Also up until the recent gas cut off news from Russia it was actually regularly dropping every week significantly below the cap, but sadly those days might be gone.

Bear in mind the agile you can sign up to now is not as good as the one I am on, they replaced the tariff with it capped at 55p instead of 35p and also bumped up the SC a lot. Gas tracker got replaced with a new one that has 16p cap instead of 11p cap.

I will be paying more per unit than the current SVR, however will save after the next SVR, so basically I decided to take a hit for 2 months, but then benefit for the 9-10 months after. For electric the cheaper agile SC is offsetting the higher unit price. So I am really only paying more for gas on these 2 months.

That website you linked to, looks like he is only showing the new tariff now.

Here is a pic from my graph on octopus website.

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Martini1991 said:
I've given up getting in touch with them at this rate.

Just as long as I continue to pay a high direct debit it'll eventually work it way out.
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That's what I did with Octopus. They didn't bill me for 14 months after I moved house. I sent them emails about it early on, and then just continued paying £120/month and submitting monthly meter readings. When they finally sorted the problem, they could only back-bill 12 months.
 
Richie said:
So there are effectively 2 caps - a SC one and a kWh one?

I thought it was all rolled in together to give a total cap level - my mistake
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Yeah there is 2 and they vary from region to region.

The way Ofgem have been announcing it as some big lump sum annual cost has been very misleading and confusing.

On the Ofgem tables, the SC is shown as a annual zero usage cost. Divide by 365 to get the daily SC.
 
chrcoluk said:
Yeah there is 2 and they vary from region to region.

The way Ofgem have been announcing it as some big lump sum annual cost has been very misleading and confusing.

On the Ofgem tables, the SC is shown as a annual zero usage cost. Divide by 365 to get the daily SC.
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Almost like it would be a good idea for them to publish expected percentage increases for the SC and the Gas and elec kwh prices rather than giving a catch all "average household will increase from x to Y" :cry:
 
Zenduri said:

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That's in line with what the futures market suggests too - prices are going up, and aren't expected to come down significantly for a couple of years.

For anyone not getting the hint, now is the time to look at ways to cut your energy use. By November, electric blankets (as an example) are going to be like bog roll at the start of the pandemic, or fans during the 2019 heatwave - in short supply and being scalped. Same for smart thermostats, and other easy energy saving upgrades.
 
robj20 said:
What I do is I have a separate current account just for bills and have for a while been putting a bit extra into it that will cover what ever happens with energy bills. I can just forget about it that way.
Anything left in my main current account I can do what I like with.

As has been said it's amazing how many people just can't look after their money.
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I'm guessing you're on a Pay As You Go tariff, which is normally more expensive than a standard direct debit tariff. I'm happy enough for my supplier to have my credit for 6 months, as I'd only make coppers from the interest on it anyway. For me, the savings from being on a standard direct debit far outweigh the additional cost of a PAYG tariff.

Martini1991 said:
The customer support for these energy companies (British Gas for me) seems to have nigh on collapsed as well.

I'm on SVR for electricity with a smart metre in a new build house. The smart metre doesn't work (And I've reported it, waiting now well over a month) so I had 0 consumption charges from date of move in till I gave a fixed reading. Because the fixed reading was after the price cap and they'd already "billed" me pre price cap, we were billed the full amount 7 months usage on the new price cap.

Rang up and the first guy understood exactly and said he'd get a new bill revised.
A month later and nothing happened, rang up again and the next person couldn't understand and said I was billed correctly.

Got online and then they reversed the charges, I provided a metre reading point on the 31st March so they could bill December-March old price and April - Then on new price. For some reason I was billed a total of £60 for that entire 7 months......................

Rang them again today and everything got reversed and instead of £60 for 7 months I've been billed £57 for 8 months.......

So now I'm sat on a ton of credit that is British Gas's they seem incapable of billing me for, they're messing with my direct debits and I'm at the point of giving up trying to correct it.
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I'm with EDF and I agree that their customer support can be hit and miss. I find that things go far smoother when I'm speaking to somebody in the same country as me and who doesn't work in an offshore call centre.
 
Puzzled said:
How does the energy unit price work out at the moment, are you able to switch enough usage to the cheap night period to make it cheaper on average than the SVR cap?

Edit:

Had a look and I'm finding it hard to see why the agile tariff makes sense at the moment. Even the cheap times look more expensive than the SVR?

www.energy-stats.uk

Octopus Agile East Midlands | Energy Stats UK

View historical tariff data for Octopus Agile East Midlands back to 2018. Claim £50 of free credit when joining Octopus Energy.
www.energy-stats.uk www.energy-stats.uk
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Agile is a tough one to make work at the moment, unless you have solar and a battery right now according to my phone the agile app is locked all day at the max 35p per kw/h so there is no benefit for most for agile....... where you can make bank however is that between 4pm nd 8:30pm the export price is actually more than the import price, so it is workable but only if you can create stored energy to sell it at the best time.

right now its a very fortunate group who can do this, and i am very aware for now its a wealthy persons game.... but as time goes on with more and more cars which will support energy to grid, more and more people will be able to make use of this..... but not this winter unfortunaely. (cheapest cars which offer this at the moment is the new model MG ZS electric - note i havent done it myself as i cant afford one) The nissan leaf can also do it over the chademo socket but i think it needs to be activated via software, Octopus are trialing it but it is with cars supplied by them (I attended a virtual seminar on it last year and almost signed up). any old leaf cant do it.
 
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McPhee said:
That's in line with what the futures market suggests too - prices are going up, and aren't expected to come down significantly for a couple of years.
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Let's be honest, if they stay that high for 2 years, there's little chance of them coming down as people will be used to the high price so the companies will likely just keep the prices if there's little pushback
 
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