Add your feedback on energy supplier Shell Energy (formerly First Utility)

gcheeseman

Update ... One hour on hold. My £190 direct debit reduced to £125. They could not explain why it was set so high to start with (increased from £130 4 months ago). I had an email saying it would reduce back in June - needless to say it didn't. I'm now £250 in credit ... multiply that by a few thousand customers and it's easy to see why they program the computers to increase dd's and never reduce them ....

phaedra1106uk

Terrible

After over 40 years of never missing a payment or previously having any problems switching energy suppliers FU (good choice of initials!) say they can't accept me without a £300 deposit which they will hold for 6 months or maybe longer!. Took two phone calls and over 48mins on the phone with some extremely unhelpful people to cancel my switch over, told it would be instant but 24hrs later MSE still says switch is still in progress. Avoid.

Alex444

How they have a trading licence I do not know, they must have millions outstanding in bill repayments.

dippydolly

Are you trying to depress me? After spending weeks back and forward to N Power trying to get errors corrected, I eventually got it sorted and moved to FU. The actual transfer was seamless, and I Emailed them to thank them as I move regularly and have ALWAYS previously had problems, so I was pleased it was straightforward. Now it looks as if it might be out of the frying pan into the fire - They must have some happy customers surely?

martin2345uk

dippydolly wrote: »

Are you trying to depress me? After spending weeks back and forward to N Power trying to get errors corrected, I eventually got it sorted and moved to FU. The actual transfer was seamless, and I Emailed them to thank them as I move regularly and have ALWAYS previously had problems, so I was pleased it was straightforward. Now it looks as if it might be out of the frying pan into the fire - They must have some happy customers surely?

I'm currently switching to them too! Hmmm. Well, I guess every company will have issues and the like; let's just hope that we manage to get through this relatively unscathed...!! Just take regular readings and keep note of them!

POLAR_BILL

Me too! I started 19th July. Started efficiently with E-mail confirmations and at 2 weeks E-mail saying my 2 week cooling off period was over and the changeover would take 4 weeks, Watch this space!

dippydolly

Watching!! and almost holding my breath.:j

POLAR_BILL

Seems to be moving as my current supplier just rang offering me a better deal and asking why I was leaving them. As I am changing through MSE cheap energy club, I don't know where this "better deal" was coming from, as there was no match on their site!

jbuchanangb

I have recently switched from npower to FU and made it through to the first monthly bill. I also administer my elderly father's energy account, and he has been with FU for well over two years. For at least the first year he paid monthly by cheque, and the only difficultly I had was when he decided to change over to DD. It took them 4 months to achieve this with the bill building up. He pays the full bill amount each month now, whereas I opted to pay a fixed amount each month, which is £15 per month less than I was paying npower. FU were very prompt, with the first DD right at the start of the first month, so 2 months DDs had been taken before the first bill. I will build up a bit of a credit before winter.

GreyArea_2

Have had trouble free supply from FU for 16 months to April 2014 when I changed tariff. Now whenever they issue an estimated bill, the month following they will readjust their original estimate and issue a small credit (so far no debits) to the previous month's usage.

It's confusing as hell. I basically get a bill at the end of one month that says "we estimate you used 100kwh" and then the following month there's a line on the bill to the effect of "sorry, we'd like to change our estimate for last month to 95kwh".

I've complained about it and received dismissive, poorly spelled and grammatically comical replies to the effect that "It's all the government's fault".

I don't know why they've seen fit to expend time on this (it wasn't broken, so don't fix it), especially when the same money and effort spent on customer service training would evidently be more wise.

I suspect I may have a different version of "FU" for them if this doesn't change soon...