PAYG non-E7 leccy spreadsheet

weakpassword

This spreadsheet[1] might be useful for those on pre-payment non-E7 electricity.

Link to spreadsheet here, plz

Dig out your receipts, change my data for yours, if you're not on British Gas then change that too, and then go over to the right (no, not Osbourne-ville) and have a look at the graph.

By giving the spreadsheet top-up amounts and dates it works out how many units you used per day (and some averages, kinda needlessly), and then using other supplier prices and day-count it can work out what you would have spent had your supplier been different.

On the phone recently British Gas were able to tell me everything about my service apart from the number of kWh I had used up to that point. So the piece of info that is most useful for accurately determining which supplier to switch to is not forthcoming. Wnakres, quite frankly. So I worked it out, but in an overkill way. By sharing the overkill perhaps it will empower some people to be able to move to the least abusive player in the market? (Even though I am engaging with the market, I still think it utterly stinks. Loads of companies all trying to cream off a profit? The same tasks repeated by many business? Without that kind of waste the costs could be lower, money could be redirected into improving the energy networks instead of improving shareholder dividends or CxO pay packets, or being spent on public denials of anthropomorphic climate change or other such anti-social corporate habits).

What is depressing is how stunningly similar all the suppliers are. Using this I have determined that I should move to Ebico though (a front for SSE, or what?).

Embed/link to graphic here, plzkthx

BG has hiked their prices so it is only useful for historic purposes (or if you have been on BG on their old price). Marker is a spare row for another supplier, graphed at 10p/day and 5p/unit, it is grim to compare to the others.

I'm no accountant, I don't Excel professionally or anything, so this spreadsheet is rather s h i t (eg it's tedious to extend - if I had planned things better things like adding more suppliers would be trivial), and I make no guarantee about lack of errors. But even so the 'sheet is better than speculating, and in some ways better than price comparison sites (not having to tell some third party all about yourself, for example. If you change one figure it will immediately update, no going back and forth on some "web-app"). If you have more than about 36 top-up receipts then the spreadsheet will need extending to get a good picture.

The 'sheet does have a few weeks of SSE E7 data of mine and pricing data, but ignore it, the spreadsheet isn't geared up to work with E7 (and making predictions for E7 I think is rather difficult, without near "smart-meter" levels of data). Price comparison websites must have a very hard time trying to get this accurate, meaning being on the best value E7 is a nightmare for the customers.


But who needs third parties when we have computers ourselves? The whole point of money and Web2.0 is the scope for lock in. If you don't compute on your computer but on some corporate machine in "the cloud", likely putting your data on their computer too, they are in the perfect position to screw you down the line.

I wish the regulator would force the leccy companies to publish a standardised file on their websites that they have to constantly kept up-to-date with their prices. That way price comparison sites could pull the data they need automatically, but so could any other person with a computer and an internet connection. RSS is a technology that could probably underpin this.

[1] Made with LibreOffice 4. If you happen to have some kind of pay-for, sub-standard proprietary-ware that refuses to implement open and royalty-free standards then please contact whoever provides your support to deal with the shortcomings. Or write-off your junkware and use FOSS (.... haha, I say this but trying the 'sheet in Calligra Sheets the graph doesn't work quite right).

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(Booo:.
"Sorry as a new user you are not allowed to post with links. This is done to stop spammers clogging up the site. Please edit your message below to continue."
I can't attach anything either. I'll post without the guts of the message, report myself, and ask for the bits to be added).

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

I've only skim read your post, and obviously I haven't seen the spreadsheet, but does it do anything a price comparison site doesn't?

I'm surprised BG wouldn't tell you your usage in KWh, they (and other suppliers) normally tell you routinely.

weakpassword

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays wrote: »

I've only skim read your post, and obviously I haven't seen the spreadsheet, but does it do anything a price comparison site doesn't?

Yeah, it doesn't have gimmicky characters on it or vague promises about how much less you might spend, if you happen to be average (which of course no one is).

It stands to give the user more control, if you don't trust the maths you can actually look at how it works. That cannot be done with programs running on computers you do not own nor control (aka price comparison web sites).

With a proprietary program on your computer trying to figure out what it does at worst you risk breaking civil law, and as such details of bugs become known to the public, and fixed. To try and figure out what goes on in a "web-app" likely risks breaking criminal law.... the chances of finding out if comparison sites are trustworthy I fear is too high, and the chances of finding out about bugs or security holes are vanishingly small (the only time the general public stand to find out is when there is a high-profile incident, like when Monster.com had all the CVs copied).

By inputting plenty of data the graph can reflect usage fluctuations. IME price comparisons sites just like to present big headline-style numbers, the spreadsheet and graph give some form of visualisation. The visualisations likely could be better, but I do feel that seeing lines snake virtually parallel does show you much more that the price comparison sites.

It just be missing colons, slashes and dots. A person should be able to decode this, I wonder if vBulletin will miss it?
https www lucanops net internewt electrons png

The spreadsheet is called PAYGleccy.ods, in the same directory.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays wrote: »

I'm surprised BG wouldn't tell you your usage in KWh, they (and other suppliers) normally tell you routinely.

I was too, and I discussed it with the call-centre agent. I wrote down what they could tell me, the date when I started, total spent, money spent per day, unit rate, daily charge. From that the number of kWh used can be calculated, but they just did not have that number right there to read to me.

BG will have decided to have the spend per day figure available, which to me implies they decided not to have kWh used figure available. Their system is already counting days and dividing to work out the per day customer spend, it really could do similar to work out the kWh.

It could of course be the realities of "on the job training", the agent didn't really know what they were doing.

Oh, I s'pose it could be because as they provide plain service and E7 the complication E7 brings means actually saying how many kWh have been used is difficult (has the customer used lots of cheap night-time leccy, or a little expensive day-time?). So they don't bother trying with the non-E7 customers.

This is something that this spreadsheet will do that a comparison site likely will never do, tell non-E7 users how many kWh they are actually using (my meter has a count of kWh but I don't know when it was last zeroed, probably before I moved into this flat).

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

weakpassword wrote: »

Yeah, it doesn't have gimmicky characters on it or vague promises about how much less you might spend, if you happen to be average (which of course no one is).

It stands to give the user more control, if you don't trust the maths you can actually look at how it works. That cannot be done with programs running on computers you do not own nor control (aka price comparison web sites).

With a proprietary program on your computer trying to figure out what it does at worst you risk breaking civil law, and as such details of bugs become known to the public, and fixed. To try and figure out what goes on in a "web-app" likely risks breaking criminal law.... the chances of finding out if comparison sites are trustworthy I fear is too high, and the chances of finding out about bugs or security holes are vanishingly small (the only time the general public stand to find out is when there is a high-profile incident, like when Monster.com had all the CVs copied).

By inputting plenty of data the graph can reflect usage fluctuations. IME price comparisons sites just like to present big headline-style numbers, the spreadsheet and graph give some form of visualisation. The visualisations likely could be better, but I do feel that seeing lines snake virtually parallel does show you much more that the price comparison sites.

It just be missing colons, slashes and dots. A person should be able to decode this, I wonder if vBulletin will miss it?
https www lucanops net internewt electrons png

The spreadsheet is called PAYGleccy.ods, in the same directory.



I was too, and I discussed it with the call-centre agent. I wrote down what they could tell me, the date when I started, total spent, money spent per day, unit rate, daily charge. From that the number of kWh used can be calculated, but they just did not have that number right there to read to me.

BG will have decided to have the spend per day figure available, which to me implies they decided not to have kWh used figure available. Their system is already counting days and dividing to work out the per day customer spend, it really could do similar to work out the kWh.

It could of course be the realities of "on the job training", the agent didn't really know what they were doing.

Oh, I s'pose it could be because as they provide plain service and E7 the complication E7 brings means actually saying how many kWh have been used is difficult (has the customer used lots of cheap night-time leccy, or a little expensive day-time?). So they don't bother trying with the non-E7 customers.

This is something that this spreadsheet will do that a comparison site likely will never do, tell non-E7 users how many kWh they are actually using (my meter has a count of kWh but I don't know when it was last zeroed, probably before I moved into this flat).

I should state before I begin I'm no fan of price comparison sites, and Ann Robinson (uswitch, not the other one) is the real winner when prices go up, much more so than any energy company.

However, as long as you have your annual usage figures in KWh and you can remember your postcode, they will tell you what you will spend on any of the tariffs available. Anyone with a modicum of sense will ignore savings, and focus on what they will pay on the new tariff, rather than pay now.

When it comes to the security issue, you have a point, but then where do you stop? If you want to secure yourself entirely, don't use the internet. Even the silkroad users who thought they were untraceable are being rounded up.

I work with spreadsheets on a daily basis, and look forward to checking this out when I get home.

I don't think the lack of info has anything to do with E7/non E7. More likely you spoke to a fairly new recruit who couldn't find the data in the crappy SAP implementation these energy firms seem to have. A more experienced operative would have found it in seconds.

weakpassword

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays wrote: »

I've only skim read your post, and obviously I haven't seen the spreadsheet, but does it do anything a price comparison site doesn't?

A slightly better example than my other reply was hinted at by this from the thread starter:

What is depressing is how stunningly similar all the suppliers are. Using this I have determined that I should move to Ebico though

Price comparison sites did not suggest Ebico as the cheapest for me (err, should have perhaps mentioned that earlier). In part that's because their sites ask for things like kWh used or price (with supplier/service) in annual or quarterly chunks, but I have about 6 months data, mostly summer. The spreadsheet stands to give as complete a picture as possible based on the data the user has, potentially even combining usage from different suppliers.

For me to tell a site how much I use per year would mean extrapolating from what I know, plus trying to add some for winter, or only using some of what I know, again allowing for winter.

See this spreadsheet as more choice maybe. I'm not keen on the way comparison sites work, even if you think comparison sites rock then this SS could be used to double-check what they have to say.


The spreadsheet also enabled me to fiddle with the data to try and figure out the best supplier for the winter. I am able to just raise the figures in the units per day column and that will cascade to all the other suppliers, where the differences between standing charge and p/kWh come into play. The horses in the race shuffled position slightly, but still a pretty packed crowd, basically not much in it. Which kinda confirms that awesome allegation Ian Hislop made on HIGNFY about the power companies being a cartel.....

Another thing I should perhaps have said is that the supplier prices are for the Midlands region. Remember to change things if you are elsewhere and want to try and work this mess

weakpassword

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays wrote: »

I work with spreadsheets on a daily basis, and look forward to checking this out when I get home.

Uh-oh.... Prepare yourself for a lot of "!!!!!!"s!

I work in IT but I have never had any formal spreadsheet training, and supporting user's spreadsheets can be one of the worst things to be asked about... I know I'm not very good with the things (though I do tend to muddle through - but knowing a uber-Excel-er from "upstairs" is always helpful). I have a good idea what can be done, but getting there? Hmmmm. I tend to end up doing lots of simple things, instead of using a built in function, trying to implement dubious years-old maths education!