No, this was my own (correct) reading sent to SE and which they used for starting my Equigas account. SE then sent a different reading (50 meter units (i.e. 5000 ft^3) /higher/ through the EDI system to BG, resulting in me getting charged twice for thirty-odd quid's worth of gas...
[Crap web site]
As I said, the problems were only with registering on the SE web site, which is entirely optional of course. The transfer itself was fine, _except_ for the wrong gas meter reading being sent.
[Consumption history]
I hate these rolling monthly DD schemes, where you end up paying them in advance most of the time. As I said, one of the attractions of Equipower & Equigas is that you can pay quarterly bills (always in arrears of the actual consumption) by BACS or whatever without being penalised on the price. I'll accept estimated readings if the bill's within about ten quid of reality, otherwise they get revised readings - this at least assures that they should build up an accurate usage history to base future estimates on.
When I was quoted a DD payment for (metered) water and more recently for electricity which I considered too high I said I wasn't prepared to pay that much and that if it weren't lowered I'd cancel the DD and go back to quarterly payments. The payments were lowered to what I suggested and they've been pretty accurate so far. When the price rises I'll accept that the payments will have to increase too but it must still be proportionate.
Now that I'm in credit I'm going to change my payments to the phone company.
I'm very keen on DD for everything because it means I never forget to pay and never have debts or worries (that's a constant nag as well as being expensive) but I'm not prepared to pay over the odds.
DD is far preferable to the companies than quarterly payments so it's worth negotiating - NOT arguing!
This started off as a rant about Powergen but that's not my experience. Feed in meter readings from time to time or after a statement and you get an accurate statement. Orginally paying too much but no problem getting a refund. Now my monthly payment is about right. Be surprised if you couldn't get your monthly payment right if you tried. For the moment Powergen is about the cheapest (Equipower and Equigas excepted). Not had any notification (yet) of an increase and no evidence of a press release on the subject though an increase soon wouldn't surprise me. If there is I won't rant but make a balanced decision. Well not BG whatever the fugures indicate.
Sorry, you've missed my point completely - I wasn't talking about getting monthly payments right, I was talking about not wanting to pay that way at all.
Not for electricity round here (East Anglia), where they taken over as the default supplier (Eastern Electricity -> TXU Energi -> Powergen). They're the most expensive.
Now who's being irrational? I never had any problem with BG, as default gas supplier, until their prices started to go off the scale.
What is worth ranting about (IMHO) is the lack of clear visible published tariffs in this industry. Go to most suppliers' Web sites and look for their price lists. Usually you can't find any, just useless 'savings calculators' and stuff like that. Where they do exist the tariffs tend to be well buried in the site without obvious navigation.
And amongst the most expensive for here (Cumbria). Starting with NORWEB =
then TXU etc... Our main supplier is Scotish Power online with standing =
charge. The less used supplies are on Equipower (no standing charge at all not even a "hidden one"(*) and a fixed reasonable price for what you= use).
Quite just now from Powergen of 14.931p/unit 1st 900. 9.261p for the rest. Scottish Power just gone up to 7.19p/unit. Equipower 7.8p/unit for normal tarrif. Equipower 2.73 - 9.19p/unit for E7.
2p/unit price difference doesn't seem much but at an average of 22 units/day that's =A3165/year!
(*) The vast majority of the "no standing charge" accounts charge you significantly more for the first X units/qtr. It's odd that the price difference between the first X units and the rest multiplied by the number of units at the higher price equals the standing charge...
Not when I looked you can see the details of the tarrifs being offered. Of course not all suppliers may be listed but you can always use other "switch" sites that are about to check. But be aware that there is only 2 or 3 actual databases about and many different switch sites just offer slightly different looking interfaces to the same underlying data. A decent site will say who their data source is.
Very true, and you could say it's a complete con, although there can still be circumstances in which you gain - when, for example, your summer gas consumption is almost zero because you use electricity for water heating in the summer.
Wouldn't have thought using lecky at nearly 10p/unit would be ever more economic than gas at less than 5p/unit. However not having mains gas it is not a calculation I have ever even thought about doing....
About two thirds of my leccy usage is night-rate (immersion, washing, drying though am using the big orange thermonuclear ball at the moment) even when I'm working at home. I've been wondering if, in a different house I could generate a few hundred watts during the day and make the large daytime component of my leccy bill disappear.
The tricky bit is whether to have a fancy mains-feeding inverter, for which Powergen might give you a measly 3p/kWh or just have seperate rings for things like fridge, computer, telly.
Well in my case the comparison is night-rate electric at 2.75 p/kWh against gas at 1.85 p/kWh (both +VAT). So the gas only wins if burnt at over about 65% efficiency. Since I have an ancient cast iron open flue boiler and long 28mm gravity primary circuit to the cylinder I doubt that the overall efficiency is that high. One day it will get replaced by something more modern, but until then I'll continue to heat a cylinderfull each morning on the E7, then top it up during the day if necessary using gas.
At the beginning of the 1970's, our electricity came mainly from our own coal, with well over 300 years of reserves known, so we were completely self-sufficient in electricity supply. Ten years later, we were no longer mining coal, but importing it. Then came the sell off and split up of the CEGB. The CEGB's remit had been to provide a highly reliable electricity supply, and indeed we had one of the most reliable supplies in the world under the control of the CEGB. Following the sale of the generating plant, the remit became maximum profit. That's not consistant with keeping generating plant in reserve for emergency backup, and such plant was decomissioned. Also, within 8 years of privitisation, the UK electricity generated from gas went from nearly 0% to 40%. This was mostly done by companies who purchased cheap low efficiency gas generators, and signed up for cheap gas contracts which allowed the gas companies to cut them off if there was a shortage. Combine this with the privitisation of the gas industry, which similarly resulted in scrapping nearly all the country's gas storage capacity (down to just 3 day's worth at one point). This was fine until we had a cold winter, and there wasn't enough gas capacity to supply domestic heating and the gas generators, and we came very close to rolling blackouts. This did alarm the government, who up until then had ignored all warnings about loss of generation contingency.
Gas storage capacity has been increased to about 11 days now (contrast with 75 days in Germany, which they still consider far too little and are expanding). We've had a few more incidents of being right on the very edge of rolling backouts due to insufficient electricity generation in the last few years, where we've been withing minutes of initiating load shedding (blacking out large areas to maintain stability of supply to the remainder).
Another factor, which has shown up recently in Soho, is the lack of maintenance to things like redundant electricity feeds, resulting in extended power outages when failures occur and backup facilities are no longer operational. One issue here is that maintenance to infrastructure used to be done during the summer when consumption was lower, but in many areas of the country, consumption is now higher in the summer than the winter due to air conditioning load, making finding usable maintenance windows harder.
It's just a matter of time before we cross over our peak generation capacity on some cold winter's day and chunks of the UK get cut off, as the baseline consumption is rising each year. Alternatively, failure of just one large power station could trigger this. We needed to start building replacement nuclear or coal plants over 10 years ago. Also, expect to see more smaller areas get hit by power cuts as the network increasingly suffers from aging kit and lack of maintenance.
We are currently stuck with a system based on a leagacy of dirt cheap gas. Look what's happened to prices now that we are no longer self-sufficient in gas, and bear in mind that we are still 90% self-sufficient, currently importing only 10% of consumption. This will rise to 40% in the next 3-4 years, so just imagine where gas and electricity prices are likely to go.
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