Should I get a price capped or green energy tariff? Article Discussion Area

I,M_SAD

Does anyone else find scottish power online 4 expensive or is it just me,my dd has increased from £50 TO £87 per month.

jillie1974

am i toolate to cap??
my npower gas has gone from £25 a month to £48 !!
also have elec witht hem so prob goign up as well???

LouBlue

I,M_SAD wrote: »

Does anyone else find scottish power online 4 expensive or is it just me,my dd has increased from £50 TO £87 per month.

I am with Scottish Power Online Saver Energy and it has gone up from £76 to £98, 2 of us in a one bed flat...I am going to ring them in the morning and see what they can offer me, I will also do a compare, its ridiculous!!

hd1965

Hi
this is my first post on MSE, hope I've got the right place to have a good moan! But I was so apalled by Eon & its lack of ethics this week.
I have been that good citizen of the world, recycling, saving energy, saving money, for donkeys years. With the world as it is & finances as a single mum not stretching quite as far as they used to I rang Eon to cap my energy bills, but because I'm on Go Green I'm not allowed to, its Go Green or capped, energy companies should be not allowed to force its customers to have to choose between saving money because they have to & the enviroment.. its a win win situation for them, make more money on Go Green or pass the enviroment/green issue on to the customer.
sorry if this has been posted before but I just had to say something!!!

penrhyn

You have leaned an important lesson, that most products/services containing the words Eco, green,environmentally friendly, ethical, renewable,organic,sustainable etc are just a cynical method by big business of extracting more money from the idealistic, and possibly niaive consumer.
Of course I could be wrong, or just cynical.

amcluesent

Time to come off capped rates? I see some analysts are saying $50 oil. Of course the not-a-cartel-at-all energy suppliers may forget about how their gas prices are linked to oil when the price is on the way down! But global recession = lower demand = lower prices or it should!

Mrs_Mop

:rolleyes: We took MSE advice and changed to a capped system from British Gas. This was back in early August and were given a changeover date of September 13th. We duly took our meter readings and sent them to British Gas and our old supplier. Nothing happened, and on contacting British Gas at the beginning of this week they didn't seem to know about us and said we would have to start again and go onto the latest tarriff. We pointed out that we have a written confirmation from British Gas and that whilst we are still with our old supplier it is costing us more money and we will be looking to British Gas to pay the difference. We were then told that we would have to speak to someone else. After holding on for 58 minutes no-one answered the call and the original person came back to us and said she would get someone to phone but it would probably take 48 hours, this was 4 days ago and we are going to try again this afternoon. We will certainly be escalating the problem if we don't get any answers this afternoon, but do make sure that your supplier has changed when you think they have or you could be caught out like we nearly were.

mrpointy

amcluesent wrote: »

Time to come off capped rates? I see some analysts are saying $50 oil. Of course the not-a-cartel-at-all energy suppliers may forget about how their gas prices are linked to oil when the price is on the way down! But global recession = lower demand = lower prices or it should!

I'm certainly thinking the capped deal was a bad move, but hey, everything is so volatile at the moment, it may be the right thing to have done after all.

Like you though, I think the recession will keep prices down for a while now, even though OPEC are reducing production to try & keep oil prices higher, so the energy price rises expected in January will probably be pretty small now.

Might be time to swallow the cancellation fee & switch to the cheapest variable rate again......will see what my first bill says & then decide, even though I can clearly see the tariffs are much lower!

Good luck with your gamble everyone :beer:

ptsanders

I am really confused over the whole price capping thing, having just come to a vaguely acceptable solution to a dispute I have been having with British Gas.

In November 2006 (after being made redundant) I signed up to Fix and Fall 2 from British Gas, at that time it was being heavily promoted on their website as a way of saving money, a capped rate and I think plugged as being 4% lower than standard rate. I signed up online by ticking a box on the house.co.uk website, and then received a confirmation email.

In August this year I discovered after checking my account that I was still paying the standard tarrif, the change to Fix and Fall 2 hadn't gone through.
Having just paid the usual quarterly bills I pointed out the mistake to British Gas, who after a bit of hummin and aaahing promised to correct the Tarrif and backdate the bills to Fix and Fall for the 18 months or so of the incorrect Tarrif.

Then.... I received the corrected Bills, that showed that I now owed B.G. nearly a £100 !!!

It took me over three weeks of emails and many long telephone calls to be allocated a "personal account manager" to sort it out.

B.G. Resolved the problem, by putting me back on the Standard Tarrif, backdating it all to Standard Tarrif again,paying £240 into my account for overpayment of GAS, (the direct debit is too high) and by form of apology gave me a7p 'Goodwill payment' for Electricity (To make the amount owed zero).

I have asked a number of times if Fix and Fall 2 was ever cheaper than the standard rate, or if it was more expensive over the 18 month period, and for further details i.e. the full terms and conditions in writing of the 'capped rate'.
So far I have received no explanation, and am back on the Standard Rate.

I am very suspicious of capped rates now, and am not sure whether I should switch away from British Gas or not.

Pete

ptsanders

This is what they said below, and the second bit of the fix and fall deal when it dropped by 4.5% wasn't enough to make up for the fact that the fixed rate had been more expensive for months. I think I'll steer clear of fixed rate deals myself.

With the standard variable rates as of September 2006, with Fix & Fall 2, these rates were fixed until 31 December 2007. When the prices decreased in 2007, the rates didn’t drop on Fix & Fall 2 due to them being fixed.