To cap or not? Urgent advice please!

fatpiggy

Hi everyone. Having seen Martin's urgent advice to go for a cap on gas and electric charges, plus the recent reports that prices could go up 70% in the near future I immediately fed my current charge details into both Uswitch and MoneySupermarket. They both came up with the best being Scottish Power and then Eon. Obviously, this would immediately cost me more, but I thought I'd offset at least the first years extra (c. £40) with my £30 cashback. But then I looked at reviewers comments and the general opinion was that you shouldn't touch either of these companies with a bargepole. I'm currently with EDF for dual fuel and in the last few weeks they finally realised that my DD payments for gas are way more than they need to be - Ive been paying £50 pm for gas (£15 for leccy). They paid me back over £300 last year, and just gave me another £284 - no quibbles and very easy to get it back, plus reduced my gas DD to £19 pm. Whooppeee - extra money to use to pay off my overdraft! I should say that although my house is 3bedroomed, I live there on my own, only have the central heating on for about 4 hours in the winter evenings and keep the thermostat to about 63. I don't heat upstairs at all and the house is well insulated. My gas use in the summer months is one ring on the cooker! When I first changed to EDF (via London Energy) I was paying quarterly bills, and these were low so it came as quite a shock to be paying so much extra for gas every month - more than I was paying previously for a quarter! It has just occurred to me that if I switch, exactly the same thing is likely to happen again - up will go my DDs, effectively twice ,to accommodate the higher charge, plus the usual hike as supplier will see it as easy money, because that is how they make vast profits!! So by potentially saving money in the future (longest cap I can get is to October 2009 btw) it could cost me alot in the immediate future and I really want to hammer my overdraft (c. £4K) down as soon as possible. Given that other customers have had real difficulty reclaiming their own overpaid money from these suppliers and can't get them to use realistic DD figures, here is the million dollar question - is it worth my while switching???

Ducks_Bum

Scottish Power and EON are no worse than any of the other suppliers for customer service. When you read reviews about companies it is very unlikely to read a positive one as you don't think anything of having a good supplier.

In the last twelve months I have been with Npower, Scottish Power, EON and Southern Electric. All as good/bad as each other.

Personally the only company I would ever avoid is British Gas but they seem to have sorted their acts out now but I am still dubious.

Definitely go for a capped price and either of those companies should be fine. They'll have 10-15 million customers between them, problems are always going to arise but the majority are happy (as can be in todays climate)

1carminestocky

I *think* you could get £62 cashback for changing to Scottish Power if you went through Quidco. Why let Moneysupermarket keep £30 of your cash?

fatpiggy

So I can! Many thanks for that - the extra money will be a big help in offsetting the increase.