Electricity cost

Android08

Is there anything that we can do about the cost of the electricity? I am in a student house share with 3 others and the gas and electric are both on pre-pay meters. I have just noticed that the cost of the electric has gone up and we are now paying 13.1p/kwh. We cannot have the meter removed, the land lord wants it there so that there is no problems with debt at the property although we have only recently moved in so this problem was probably with previous tenants.

I have looked around and this seems to be about double the normal rate. Can anything be done about the price that we are paying, we don't even know who to contact about this, there is no phone number on the meter or anything.

The meter is also charging us 83p/week, I have found the manual for it and it says that it will charge an amount/week to pay off any debt although we don't have any. I know this isn't much but we are currently using about £10/week so this is about 8% of that.

Thanks for any help.

CLAPTON

a normal rate for electricity is e.g.

16.8p per kwhr for the first 661 kwhr consumed in a quarter
with everything else charged at 10.11p

plus vat at 5%

so you may be paying at a higher rate but not double

I would suggest you speak to your landlord

lilysgarden

Sadly there's nothing you can do. We've been in our flat for 4 years with a pre-pay meter, and even though the landlord is happy for us to have the meter removed, the electricity company wont remove it because of bad credit from previous tenants. Afraid it's just one of those thing you need to grin and bear while you live there. Will say it makes you far more conscious of wasting power though, everything gets switched off in our place when it's finished with!!!

[Deleted User]

The only company that has fixed rates no matter what your meter type is Ebico.
They are also pretty competitive prices, although they have not yet announced any price rises as far as I know, so they might go up. They do both gas and electricity, and I worked out that in my area they would be the cheapest provider for gas, followed by Scottish Power, who would only be cheaper if we spent over £3000 a year on gas. (Ebico has a fixed rate, SP has a rate for the first x KWh and then another rate for the rest.)