Ah, I see what you mean. I agree that's potentially misleading, but it does involve taking a decision: either you lock in 12 months now, or you take 6 months of your current deal and then gamble on whatever the market will offer you then. It may well be you could get a better deal in 6 months, but you're taking a punt which could work out worse if prices rise between now and then. If you're at the limit of your affordability, going for the new
12 month deal might be worth it.
I think the moral of the story is not to listen to deals from your existing supplier. When it comes to renewal time, do a whole-of-market comparison, including whatever deals they'll give you to stay.
Only potentially? I suspect most people will just take the figures as presented and not look at how they are being derived.
Taking a 12 month fixed is a bet on the prices rising. If after 6 months the prices had fallen, you'd need to do the maths and include any penalty.
Don't follow that. For minimum bill you want the lowest price for as long as possible, taking into account any penalties. If the prices rise your winning full stop and you stick with the full 12 months fixed. If the prices fall they have to fall enough to at least recover any penalty within the duration the new contract. If it takes all of the new contract period to recover the penalty why bother switching?
Most definately they are only going to mention their tarrifs and use the misleading "savings" calculation.
Can't say I've ever seen a "retentions" deal from an electricity supplier. I don't think they are that bothered. What was the percentage of households that have never switched supplier and are still on the standard variable rate tarrif with the legacy supplier for their area. 40%?
If the word used is "will" and there is no small print qualifying how they determine any savings I suggest you set Advertisng Standards onto them. Or if you have nothing better to do, sign up, gather evidence that you are not making any saving and take them to court for the amount above what you would have paid.
If you are talking about PV panels, it costed around £3500/Kw when the first came out. I think at the moment it's around £1500/Kw.
Payments for FIT were around £0.56/Kwh in the early days for 25 years for sub 4Kwp systems. Payments now are less than £0.05/Kwh. The main benefit now is from ene rgy/cost reductions to your electricity bill. It's rumoured they may be pha sed out all together next year.
The idea in the early days was to establish a dispersed PV power sytem quic kly, hence the high payments. However, whoever conceived of the payments system was an idiot, it could h ave been far better structured to everyone's benefit. but I can't help that .
My house is a passive house, ie lots of insulation so have no heating bill at all apart from a small wood burner.
I have an electric car which is Summer gets charged for free from the PV pa nels. In Winter I charge it on cheaper night rate electricity.
I spend mu old gits heating allowance on petrol for the Roller. Which BTW is in dock having expensive repair.
Most of my electricity is expended on fridges/freezers, TV and cooking.
I am telling you this to annoy the brain dead, do nothing, usually socialis t, whingers who frequent this news group. (You know who I mean).
I was with SP for a number of years since my first switch. I kept on top of the ever-changing tariff options, and was able to stay pretty close to the best deal around - certainly not a big enough gap to be worth moving for.
My only criticism is that they were unable to respond sensibly to billing queries, and ended up paying out significant sums because of their lack of answers. They hadn't really done anything wrong, but simply could not explain themselves.
That changed with the latest round of tariffs, and I am now with Tonik.
"Who?" I hear you cry. I hadn't heard of them either, but the risk seemed pretty low, so I am giving them a go. All well so far.
I assume with the new tariff presented they're offering to waive the exit penalty as a 'special deal'?
If t_next is much more than t_offer you could potentially lose by staying on the old tariff. If t_old is much cheaper than t_offer then t_next would need to be a lot more expensive for the offer to make sense.
Because of the effective gearing, (t_next-t_old) would have to be 2x (t_offer-t_old) for the offer to make sense. That's not a bet I would take, but some might.
When I was with Scottish Power I found their billing quite good although a lot of reviews on-line suggested it was poor when you had to speak to a human. I had a fixed price internet account where I provided my own meter readings. The bill was usually calculated minutes after providing any meter reading and I had the facility on line to immediately change the DD amount. It was one of the better automated on-line systems that I've encountered.
For me SP had one of the better deals for a couple of years and then they seemed to have lost the plot. I do wonder if occasionally some of these large power companies actively go out of their way to loose all the custom not on the standard variable rate.
I'm now with Avro, who take the first DD payment the day that you sign-up/change so you will probably make a payment to your old and new suppliers in the same month.
I sent my meter readings monthly, and they sent a bill in response, though I paid by monthly DD.
Then, for some reason, they generated two new documents on 31 January 2017 which appeared to cancel a number of previous bills, and substituted a whole new set of figures, each document calculating (different) a new monthly payment. They can't be compared directly, since the new bills cover a longer period than the cancelled bills.
So, I emailed them on March 1st asking "Please can you explain why this was deemed necessary, and tabulate the original charges against your substitutions."
I got an auto response, but nothing more, so I sent the email again a fortnight later, with the same non-result.
On April 3rd I had a lengthy phone conversation with someone who gave me a complaint number, and suggested I email once more, which I did.
Finally the system attached my complaint to my account, and I could see it on line.
Still no more response, so on May 5th, I emailed again to ask:
"What do I need to do to get you to:
Provide answers my question.
Explain why your management of customer enquiries is so abysmal."
Eventually I was called by a pleasant chap (1) who explained, so far as he could, that the system apparently generates recalculated billing documents as the result of some sort of internal housekeeping, even though they have no actual impact on the charges they have made.
It would seem to be their interpretation of an Ombudsman instruction that the customer should see any such recalculations, they can't simply decide that they create more confusion than they dispel and bin them.
Anyway, profuse apologies and £100 for their lack of response, in addition to an earlier £50.
(1) Quite a chatty individual, currently working for a Masters in Civil Engineering.
Spot on. The only way to use a comparison site is as a ranking number. The higher the number the better the deal you are being offered relative to the others.
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