First house, what to do about gas and electricity please?

haziec

Hi, our daughter and SIL are moving into their first home.
Current supplier is British Gas for both.

Anyone give us an idea what steps to take to get the best price, on the grounds that they have no previous energy consumption? Its a mid terrace 3 bed house and just the two of them will be there. Going to get a month DD fixed amount.

Thought that they could go through U Switch, although have no previous figures to put in and then compare.

Then use Quido for cashback.

Can you use Uswitch and then the energy supplier on Quidco?

thanks for any help and advice.

jd87

Quidco is only giving £12 cashback for Uswitch at the moment. They can do much better than that by shopping around. There are other switching sites available that give better cashback, directly from the switching site, not via quidco. Try sites like moneysupermarket and energyhelpline. Try other cashback sites too.

To decide which supplier to switch to, all they can do for now is say that they will be average users and put this into the comparison site. After 6 months or so it might be worth them switching again, once they know what their actual consumption is like.

Premier_2

They should take meter readings on the day they move in and provide these to British Gas so that they can set up new accounts accurately for them.

When they have sufficient information about their likely annual consumption in kWh, then they can compare BG with other suppliers.

Otherwise it's a serious possible risk of fire & frying pan

asbokid

the comparison sites are next to useless since they deliberately exclude Ebico for arbitrary reasons (e.g. it's a not-for-profit, it's only a virtual supplier, etc..) Ebico won't pay those sites any commission so they are deliberately overlooked in the tables.

Ebico has consistently been one of the cheapest suppliers of both electricity and gas for the past few years..

congrats on their new home, btw!

Premier_2

asbokid wrote: »

the comparison sites are next to useless since they deliberately exclude Ebico for arbitrary reasons (e.g. it's a not-for-profit, it's only a virtual supplier, etc..) Ebico won't pay those sites any commission so they are deliberately overlooked in the tables.

Ebico has consistently been one of the cheapest suppliers of both electricity and gas for the past few years..

congrats on their new home, btw!

Which comparison site excludes Ebico?

...comparison sites are obliged by Consumer Focus (the new name for Energywatch) to list Ebico in their comparison searches...

Source: http://www.ebico.co.uk/html/e_cheapelectric.php

They are included in all the comparison sites listed in the resource bar above and in the list of comparison sites on the ebico website here:
http://www.ebico.co.uk/html/g_cheapgas.php

asbokid

Premier wrote: »

Which comparison site excludes Ebico?

Source: http://www.ebico.co.uk/html/e_cheapelectric.php

They are included in all the comparison sites listed in the resource bar above and in the list of comparison sites on the ebico website here:
http://www.ebico.co.uk/html/g_cheapgas.php

ahh.. thanks.. i'm not up-to-date... is that a relatively new rule.. within the last couple of years?

Ken68

Ebico were at one time excluded by Uswitch although mentioned in their Social Tariff page. They had their wrist slapped by Ofgem.