Choice of intelligent switches ?

zeupater

Cardew wrote: »

The figure of 6.5p/kWh for Ebico gas is reasonable for a fairly inefficient boiler.

However Ebico is more expensive for people, unless they have very low gas/electricity consumption.

The average UK gas customer uses 16,500kWh. Checking my area(Midlands) for that consumption, Ebico costs £131 more than the cheapest tariff(£833 - £702)

In fact the cost is even more as getting electricity from a different supplier means you lose the dual fuel discount. Ebico electricity is also very expensive unless you have very low consumption.

Therefore it wouldn't make financial sense for most people to get Ebico gas in order to be able to use a figure of 6.5p/kWh in calculating savings per 1000kWh.

Of the cheapest tariffs available, there are several from the 'Big 6' where gas is still under 4p/kWh.(the lowest of those I looked at was 3.53p/kWh)

Hi

Just checked the Ebico offerings against our own and they work out around pretty much the same as our current tariff with our usage pattern .... not worth even considering moving from our current fix at the moment ....

Regarding the boiler efficiency, even with an 'A' rated unit it would be very hard to achieve over 80% in the summer ... by the time that the boiler has achieved condensing efficiency it would be time to stop heating, then there's the heat-loss in the heat-exchanger and pipes which, being amortised over a much lower heat provision, becomes a much larger proportion of the total in the summer ....

HTH
Z

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Just checked the Ebico offerings against out own and they work out around pretty much the same as our current tariff with our usage pattern .... not worth even considering moving from our current fix at the moment ....

HTH
Z

Hiya, I'm in the very same boat, with a fixed deal till summer 2014. The cheapest quote for me was £27 more, and Ebico was £60 more. Plus, I don't have a hot water tank (or a clever switch!) to take advantage of excess.

I really like the principle of Ebico as a not for profit, but more importantly that they simply charge per unit - no discounts, dual fuels, payment types, multi tariffs etc, that I really feel have been used to confuse people in the past.

Hopefully more and more suppliers will offer single tariff NSC accounts, this will help people to maximise savings from both energy efficiency and energy saving. Personally, I'd be pretty annoyed if my local corner shop dropped its prices slightly, but then charged me 20 or 30p a day for the right to walk in there.

Mart.

Cardew

Martyn1981 wrote: »

I really like the principle of Ebico as a not for profit, but more importantly that they simply charge per unit - no discounts, dual fuels, payment types, multi tariffs etc, that I really feel have been used to confuse people in the past.

Hopefully more and more suppliers will offer single tariff NSC accounts, this will help people to maximise savings from both energy efficiency and energy saving. Personally, I'd be pretty annoyed if my local corner shop dropped its prices slightly, but then charged me 20 or 30p a day for the right to walk in there.

Mart.

Agree with the above.

Ironically it was pressure from organisations, including MSE, that have led to the daily standing charge as they claimed 2 tier tariffs were too complicated for the average customer to understand!

So we have now simply 'jumped out of the frying pan etc'.

I am also on a fixed tariff until Nov 2014. However if I needed a tariff now, as a high user, by far the cheapest tariff for me would be with NPower who have very high Daily Standing Charge of 50.61p gas and 44.42p electricity(£347 a year) but unit prices for gas/electricity are low at 3.53p/kWh and 10.301p/kWh respectively. In addition they have 3 discounts I need to take into account.

IMO anyone who failed to understand the 'complexities' of the tier system of tariffs, will be just as confused by the latest 'simplified' tariffs as the amount of the standing charge and various discounts all have to be taken into account, as well as knowing your annual consumption in kWh.

John_Pierpoint

Who is going to pay for the "intelligent" meter roll out.

I have fond memories of living in a block of 9 flats, where the ground landlord "forgot" to pay the electricity bill. The electricity supplier cut off the meter supplying a light bulb or two, serving the stairs, and more to the point the signal booster on the communal TV aerial.

==================================================

When the man came to replace my importing meter with a combined time-clock-and-meter, which might or might not have been caused to grind to a standstill by the installation of PV panels; I suggested that he reinstalled it there and then as my exporting meter.
I got the impression he though I was "extracting the Michael".

zeupater

Cardew wrote: »

Agree with the above.

Ironically it was pressure from organisations, including MSE, that have led to the daily standing charge as they claimed 2 tier tariffs were too complicated for the average customer to understand!

So we have now simply 'jumped out of the frying pan etc'.

I am also on a fixed tariff until Nov 2014. However if I needed a tariff now, as a high user, by far the cheapest tariff for me would be with NPower who have very high Daily Standing Charge of 50.61p gas and 44.42p electricity(£347 a year) but unit prices for gas/electricity are low at 3.53p/kWh and 10.301p/kWh respectively. In addition they have 3 discounts I need to take into account.

IMO anyone who failed to understand the 'complexities' of the tier system of tariffs, will be just as confused by the latest 'simplified' tariffs as the amount of the standing charge and various discounts all have to be taken into account, as well as knowing your annual consumption in kWh.

Hi

So what we're really saying is that thanks to campaigning organisations such as MSE, the energy suppliers have effectively been gifted the ability to seriously boost their profit margins through manipulating the standing charge ....

A standing charge (or tiered supply tariff) is simply there to cover the fixed costs incurred by the supplier(s) there is absolutely no logical reason for any one supplier to charge a substantially different value than another, and it's even less logical to have different value standing charges between offerings from the same supplier ....

Taking this into account, Cardew's dual fuel 'standing charge' at £347/year is far higher than our amortised charge at a theoretical ~£203 ..... that's ~71% more ... I wonder where the extra ~£144 is going! .... don't you just love it when 'do-gooders' get involved in taking 'complexity' out of the system .... I'd guess that most would rather pay less for their energy in the knowledge that a very small minority would be 'confused' than everyone paying more and all being 'confused' as to why .... :cool:

HTH
Z

Cardew

zeupater wrote: »

Taking this into account, Cardew's dual fuel 'standing charge' at £347/year is far higher than our amortised charge at a theoretical ~£203 ..... that's ~71% more ... I wonder where the extra ~£144 is going! ....
Z

Presumably to 'subsidise' the cheaper unit(kWh) price for gas/electricity that high users are charged;)

I just checked out costs for high and low users by comparing
someone using 50% of the UK average(i.e 8,250kWh gas and 1650kWh electricity) with someone using double(33,000/6600kWh)

The cheapest tariff for the low user in my area is £637. So four times that amount would be £2,548.

Instead the cheapest tariff is £2,087. So the more you use, the cheaper it becomes!

EricMears

Cardew wrote: »

So the more you use, the cheaper it becomes!

Isn't that a fairly typical 'economy of scale' which I'm sure I've seen touted on these pages as 'normal' (or even inevitable ?) - albeit in a slightly different context.

zeupater

Cardew wrote: »

Presumably to 'subsidise' the cheaper unit(kWh) price for gas/electricity that high users are charged;)

I just checked out costs for high and low users by comparing
someone using 50% of the UK average(i.e 8,250kWh gas and 1650kWh electricity) with someone using double(33,000/6600kWh)

The cheapest tariff for the low user in my area is £637. So four times that amount would be £2,548.

Instead the cheapest tariff is £2,087. So the more you use, the cheaper it becomes!

Hi

Isn't that because the calculation is flawed with the 'standing charge' element erroneously multiplied by 4 as well as the value of the energy consumed .... standing charge would therefore be ~£154((2548-2087)/3), so yet another value for the 'fixed' cost of energy supply ....

HTH
Z

Cardew

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

Isn't that because the calculation is flawed with the 'standing charge' element erroneously multiplied by 4 as well as the value of the energy consumed .... standing charge would therefore be ~£154((2548-2087)/3), so yet another value for the 'fixed' cost of energy supply ....

HTH
Z

Hi,

The calculation is not flawed in that £637 x 4 does indeed equal £2548.;)

I was making the point that someone who uses little energy( which is good - conservation and all that!) pays more per kWh than someone who has high consumption(which is bad!). As stated the more you use, the cost per kWh is cheaper.

In the example I used above(for electricity), the cheapest tariff for the low user means that taking into account the DSC they would be paying 15.1p/kWh; the cheapest tariff for the high user would be 12.1p/kWh. So the low user pays approx 25% more for each kWh.

Much as we(correctly) accuse the USA of using too much energy, at least where my place is the tariff discourages high consumption. The standing charges are low and, in an all-electric property, if you use more than 1,000kWh a month, each kWh over that threshold costs about 20% more.

John_Pierpoint

There is a technique called "minimum cost accounting" that tends to even out the tendency to give high large consumption discounts.
Fossil fuel suppliers have a vested interest in keeping the finite resource in the ground as its value will increase over time. Similarly generation companies might find it makes more sense to give away insulation and low energy bulbs because that is cheaper than building a new power-station to meet the increasing demand.

As it is the 40th anniversary of the Centre for Alternative Technology this year, a collection of the original visionaries (aka "nutters") were interviewed on the radio.
One advocated a system where the first few units of utility supply necessary for living in an urban environment, should be subsidised and after that the prices should rise with increasing consumption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Alternative_Technology

It was also advocated that housing should be built with a return to the historical centrally sheltered living room, known as "the snug".
ie there will always be somewhere warm in the home, come what may.

[Is that concept being embraced already? It is the room with the newly fashionable log burner ?]

ie
cosy, warm, comfortable, homely, sheltered, intimate,

I have also found evidence of a study into the effectiveness of subsidised insulation, that of the benefits of the top up insulation only 15% is taken in the form of higher room temperatures.
In the early 1970s, when the average house seemed to be stone cold about an hour after the central heating turned off, then 50% of the theoretical fuel saving was taken as improved comfort.