I’m sure I’ll get one eventually, I just don’t need one or the hassle of appointments/installation currently.
Recently received a 12 month fixed price offer from So.
Noticed the penalty charge for cancelling the contract early was £75 per fuel, previously penalty charge was £5 per fuel.
I didn’t take up the offer.
Do you have electricity as your only source of fuel ?
I hope you don’t mind me asking ?
best wishes
Electricity is the main source, but we also have gas and use our fireplace.
Our system decides based on a calculation what is cheapest and uses that. When it is freezing we see that it starts on gas and then uses the heatpump to keep the temperature on a certain level.
There is a similar penalty on our deal with Octopus. It’s a lot, but if one is happy to accept the cost for the next year, it doesn’t really matter. They don’t normally have penalties, but in this case they do, because the fuel has to be bought in advance. This was all very clearly explained, so people signing up know exactly what they are getting into.
My offer is below.
I’m currently on the capped variable tariff.
"You’re on our cheapest electricity and gas tariffs of their kind.
You could save £103.90 a year on electricity and £40.63 a year on gas by switching to Loyal Octopus 12M Fixed.
These may involve changing how you pay, your meter setup or different terms to your current tariff."
I’m not keen to move supplier at the moment, so unless these are much higher than other offers, I may as well take it.
So you are on the ‘cheapest’ but you could still save? ![]()
I always go off the kWh numbers.
I guess that means the cheapest variable rate they offer.
It really depends what view you take of future energy prices. If they are likely to go significantly lower, then fixing now may be premature. But if you think they will remain at or may go up from their present level, then fixing now is obviously attractive.
As the market is only just starting to offer fixes, I’m thinking that better offers will start to emerge and Octopus will probably improve their fix over the next few months. It’s a bit of a gamble, but taking a fix now does protect one from a big move upwards in price and that might be more important than a bigger lowering of the status quo cost.
www.cornwall-insight.com/ have just updated their prediction from last month
July:
Aug:
That’s a £20 increase for me over the next year. Biggest cost increase is electricity, which surprisingly is where they want us all to move to.
I took out this 1 year fixed deal today (with 14-day cooling off period):
Electricity
Unit price 28.02p per kWh
Standing charge 49.77p per day
Gas
Unit price 7.05p per kWh
Standing charge 27.47p per day
On quick eyeballing, it looks as though it will come out similar to my deal.
(My Annual usage is Electricity 5,421 kWh and Gas 8,775 kWh).
It starts now.
And now I can forget about energy prices for a year - yippee! ![]()
Better come off this thread then Jim, just in case someone claims a better offer ![]()
It’s all good by me.
I really don’t want to change provider at this moment.
I have had a fixed 3, & latterly, 2 year gas/electricity fixed price account with British Gas for many years & only really got any benefit from it in the past year.
My previous deal expired in June & BG sent me a very generous offer of 13 months fixed price that would save me an estimated £18 pa & was dependent on having smart meters installed, despite being told several time by them that our house was not suitable for them.
Their other offer was for an even more generous 14 months, estimated to cost £19 more pa.
I was about to accept the 14 month offer but noticed that the minimum monthly DD would be increased by nearly £50, on top of the £50 increase I agreed to on the expiry of the last fixed deal.
As our last bill, June, showed a credit of £270 (before we began paying an additional £50 pm), I decided to stick with the current variable rate tariff & take my chance on what the next few months brings.
I am sure British Gas (like many other energy companies), having got a taste for sky high profits will be doing anything they can to maintain them even if prices continue to fall. The days of pretty much anyone offering their customers a fair deal appear to have gone, probably forever.
This suggests that it is time to seriously consider nationalising some of the utilities again.
Possibly, but I was referring to many/most large organisations in all areas of the economy, not just utility companies.
With OVO, you can overpay and get interest credited against your balance, currently 5% (and that way tax free) though I think it starts at 3% for new joiners.
From memory I think the max credit is £1,000.
And their website and tools is/are the most useful I’ve seen.
They may have removed that:
https://www.ovoenergy.com/ovo-interest-reward
Just in case that link isn’t ok to post.
I got moved to Ovo for electricity last year - nightmare migration where they seemed to have used incorrect ‘actual readings’ for the opening read.
I may be finally getting my head around their billing system as the bills are not presented in a traditional format I’m used to.
The live billing system is odd - nice to see the costs when you add a reading but illogical in the sense that if my bill runs from 21st-20th every month and I provide a reading on the 20th I’d assume the next bill would use that as the ‘last reading’ but it doesn’t and tries to guess what the reading is on the 21st at the start of the next cycle. The only way I can get conventionally sensible bills is to submit a reading on the 20th and 21st to avoid the system guessing what it is on the 21st.
Oops, lucky me!



