Should I stay on Economy 7?

lilherbz

Hello,

I need some advice regarding Economy 7.

I moved into my one bedroom flat a few months ago and due to not knowing very much about bills I have kept everything the same.

I am beginning to think that my bills are high in comparison to my old house. On average I'm paying £25 electric and £35 gas - my old 3-bed house was £35 for each. I live alone now, work 40+ hours a week and have a busy social life, so I’m not actually at home very much.

I have discovered I’m on economy 7 and my average usage at night is 16-18% - national average is 40% is it worth changing on non-economy 7 and how easy is it?

I’m with BG and their tariffs for me with online saver 4 are

Elec -
Tier 1 - 27.355p
Tier 2 - 14.536p
Night - 6.642p

Can anyone help me work out how all this works?

Many thanks :-)

HappyMJ

You will most probably lose the 4% discount if you were to switch to a standard tariff so you would need to go onto a comparison website to see how much you would save by switching to another supplier. You need to manually compare..ignore the savings figure it gives you.

You can get a tariff in which all units are charged at about 10p each plus a standing charge. Even BG's price is about 11p per kWh.

macman

Typically you need to be using 30% on cheap rate to make E7 worthwhile.
What you don't say is how you currently heat your house and hot water? If you have night storage heaters and an immersion heater wired to E7 then you will to rethink how you are going to rejig your heating and hot water supply for a single rate tariff.

Wickedkitten

I've just actually phoned up Scottish Power to get us onto another fixed rate this morning after looking at the comparison sites to see if staying on E7 was a sensible option or not.

In the previous year, we used 6567 units of electricity, the best the comparison sites could do on a tarriff that isn't E7 is Ovo Energy at 9.513p per unit with a £105 a year standing charge whilst the Fixed E7 plan from Scottish Power that we are switching to is 10.635 a unit during the day, 5.53 a unit at night, and our standing charge is £90 a year so there's not that great of savings to be had by switching off e7 for us.

HappyMJ

Scottish Power is one of the only ones that does not match the standard advice of 30% or more. SP does charge a high night tariff compared to other tariffs with other suppliers. In my area it is always better for someone to stay on E7 with Scottish Power as the day peak rates are lower than their standard rates.