Considering changing to Ebico, any drawbacks?

MoneySpendingEejit

I'm with Scottish Power on a prepayment meter at present and I'm very much open to changing suppliers if it will save me money. The problem is, I consistently fail to understand how the pricing works! I'm all electric, by the way.

I presume I'm on a standard single rate tariff at present, which according to this page works out as: 31.28p per day service charge and a unit price of 11.773p.

With Ebico, it seems to be simply a unit price of 13.98p per kWh exc VAT (14.679p per kWh inc VAT), with no daily service charge.

Am I missing something here? It seems like I'd be saving £9 a month in service charges... Would the 3p per unit extra on the service price end up coming to more than the 31.28p service charge? Or is there a good chance I'd end up paying more with Ebico? I don't even know what I use on a daily basis :think:

dogshome

Nothing wrong with Ebico provided you are a low user
They have a high unit cost but no Daily Service Charge or high price NSC units for the first xxx units you consume a day.
But to know if they are right for you, you must know your annual consumption in Kwh and use a Switch site to do the arithmatic for you - I use switchwithwhich - If you have not yet had an Annual Statement from your supplier with this figure on it, phone your supplier and ask.

MoneySpendingEejit

dogshome wrote: »

Nothing wrong with Ebico provided you are a low user
They have a high unit cost but no Daily Service Charge or high price NSC units for the first xxx units you consume a day.
But to know if they are right for you, you must know your annual consumption in Kwh and use a Switch site to do the arithmatic for you - I use switchwithwhich - If you have not yet had an Annual Statement from your supplier with this figure on it, phone your supplier and ask.

I'll have to look into that, I can't recall whether I've ever had an annual statement from Scottish Power.

HappyMJ

If you are all electric it's highly likely you will have E7 or a variant. How do you heat your property?

MoneySpendingEejit

HappyMJ wrote: »

If you are all electric it's highly likely you will have E7 or a variant. How do you heat your property?

As little as possible! I avoid using the heating for as much of the year as I can, due to the heaters I have being seriously expensive to run! Right now I'm putting it on for a couple of hours in the evening and that's about it.

EDIT: I just found a statement and I'm on the 'Standard - Pay As You Go' package.

This statement is actually dated from 22nd - 30th September (I entered into a DRO at that time, which is probably why some odd statements were coming out) and in that period I used 43KWh. I guess that is what qualifies as an average week for me. That wouldn't include any heating though.

notbritishgas

MoneySpendingEejit wrote: »

I'm with Scottish Power on a prepayment meter at present and I'm very much open to changing suppliers if it will save me money. The problem is, I consistently fail to understand how the pricing works! I'm all electric, by the way.

I presume I'm on a standard single rate tariff at present, which according to this page works out as: 31.28p per day service charge and a unit price of 11.773p.

With Ebico, it seems to be simply a unit price of 13.98p per kWh exc VAT (14.679p per kWh inc VAT), with no daily service charge.

Am I missing something here? It seems like I'd be saving £9 a month in service charges... Would the 3p per unit extra on the service price end up coming to more than the 31.28p service charge? Or is there a good chance I'd end up paying more with Ebico? I don't even know what I use on a daily basis :think:

If you use just over 10kwh per day then the extra 3p per kwh would equal the daily service charge.
But as has been said above if you have night storage heating and not panel heating then the extra charge for the night units will have to be taken into account also.

I would guess that you will find that as you heat by electric you are quite a high user and ebico may not suit you.

EDIT: just seen your last post, almost certainly you will be using more than 10kwh per day (I use about 9 without electric heating) so ebico will be more expensive. To check sort out your bills for the last year and tot up your annual kwh figure and post the results.

MoneySpendingEejit

notbritishgas wrote: »

If you use just over 10kwh per day then the extra 3p per kwh would equal the daily service charge.
But as has been said above if you have night storage heating and not panel heating then the extra charge for the night units will have to be taken into account also.

I would guess that you will find that as you heat by electric you are quite a high user and ebico may not suit you.

I don't actually know what type of heater this is. It's a Dimplex and that's pretty much all I know about it besides the fact it seems to cost around £1.50 to have the thing on for approximately three to four hours! Based on the 43KWh used in 8 days earlier this year, you could estimate that my usage without heating is around 5.4KWh per day. So it seems that I would save with Ebico when not heating the place, but possibly pay more when I am... Grr!

notbritishgas wrote: »

EDIT: just seen your last post, almost certainly you will be using more than 10kwh per day (I use about 9 without electric heating) so ebico will be more expensive. To check sort out your bills for the last year and tot up your annual kwh figure and post the results.

I don't have bills for the last year. I seem to randomly receive the odd statement every now and then but I'm not sure what I've actually got here. I'll have to have a look later on tonight and come back to this thread. Thanks for the help so far though!

notbritishgas

MoneySpendingEejit wrote: »

I don't actually know what type of heater this is. It's a Dimplex and that's pretty much all I know about it besides the fact it seems to cost around £1.50 to have the thing on for approximately three to four hours! Based on the 43KWh used in 8 days earlier this year, you could estimate that my usage without heating is around 5.4KWh per day. So it seems that I would save with Ebico when not heating the place, but possibly pay more when I am... Grr!

As you are not on E7 tariff they could be panel heaters, can you switch them on during the day and they get hot or are they on in the wee hours and give out the heat during the day.

MoneySpendingEejit

I can't work the thing out to be honest with you, the switch appears to have three settings- the first two of which don't seem to do anything. The third just seems to be a 'force on' switch. It would be handy if I had some documentation for them or could identify which model they are!

pothole50

Are they mounted on the wall and have feet resting on the floor if so chances are they are storage heaters, no feet and mounted on the wall chances are they are panel heaters, is there instant heat when you switch them on.

macman

Every electrical device has a rating plate on it. Until you know what your annual kWh consumption is and what sort of heating system you have, you cannot begin to work out what tariff is best for you.