Confused about tariffs, advice please?

Chez87

Hi all I wonder if you can help me. My husband and I have just bought our first house and are looking to switch energy suppliers. We are currently on Southern Electric's standard tariff.

My question is, given that we aren't in the house too much and I don't think we have a very high usage, would we be best going for a lower standing charge, with a higher unit price? I was going to go with Ovo, but their standing charge (and unit price actually) is relatively high, although it still comes up as the cheapest for us when we use price comparison sites, why is this?

Sorry if I seem ignorant, this is all new to us, our energy bills were always included in our rent payments before!

Edit: our heating is gas, our oven is electric.

matelodave

Open up a comparison site and try several different scenarios to see what happens. Start off with about 13500kwh of gas and about 3300kw of electricity(the average uk consumption) then change the quantities to say 10000kw gas and 2500kw electric to see if you get a different result. You could also do it at 15,000 of gas and 4000kw of leccy.

The beauty of using a comparison site ot two is that they do all the calculations for you which makes it dead easy to do "what if" comparisons. Once you made a choice then monitor your consumption to make sure that you are on target and that your bills & direct debits are covering your usage. Be careful that you don't under estimate too much or you'll end up with a nasty surprise

Chez87

Ovo always came up the cheapest with all those scenarios, somehow! So I guess I will go for them. Thanks for the help.