Standing charge or no standing charge?

JayScottGreenspan

Hugbubble wrote: »

...that is the question...?

How do I work out whether it is more economical to pay a standing charge on my electricity supply or not?

Thanks

Get all your old bills and work out how many units you use per month (be careful, it could vary between seasons), then use a comparison site to find which deal's best for you. They'll do the number-crunching for you.

Martin's very helpful on this:
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/you-switch-gas-electricity

If you are a low user then a tariff with no standing charge is probably gonna be cheaper.

babykitten

Cardew wrote: »

You are making the assumption that they actually take notice of the readings we send them!!

I think for most people there is very little savings to be made on electricity as few will use less than their Tier 1 'slice'

Some people used to switch off their gas completely in the summer and heat water with the immersion - especially when Economy 7 was a more attractive proposition. Pilot lights can use a surprisingly high amount of gas.

It is to combat this that BG have decreased their Tier 1 allocation from1143 kWh per quarter to 670kWh(and increased the price of the tier 1 units to compensate) Also NPower introduced their infamous 'sculpting'(seasonal weighting) where the slice of tier 1 units in the summer is minimal.

Yes, well you often have to phone up to get them to accept the reading right enough.

I don't think there's any modern boilers that would use a pilot light now, surely? I agree that an old system which does could easily use a lot of gas over the time.

I guess the whole tiering thing depends on your supplier, so it's clear that you need to do proper calculations (if you're that way inclined) and not just assume that all NSC tariffs are the same.