Ofgem: Comfort Plus Control / Weathercall / Total Heat Total Control / Heatwise

Legacy_user

I know that many folk have asked questions about the strange teleswitched tariffs of Comfort Plus Control, SSE's Total Heat Total Control and Heatwise from E.On. I'm with Scottish Power and have searched for this topic many times, and finally found some interesting information that I thought others might also find useful.

Ofgem published a report (reference 133/13) in July 2013 called "The state of the market for customers with dynamically teleswitched meters". It makes for interesting reading, although I skipped through to find the word "Comfort". There is a section about Scottish Power's teleswitched tariffs and a section about SSE's Total Heating Total Control. The gist is that for SP customers, the tariff isn't necessarily so bad and compares well to E7 & E10. I suspect this depends a lot on having everything set-up correctly, storage heaters functioning right, decent insulation & decent windows etc.

The other particularly interesting finding is that some of the big 6 suppliers offer "mirror" tariffs which tend to be a bit cheaper. So SP continue to control the teleswitching, but another supplier does the billing, introducing a small element of competition. They don't advertise this though, and I wouldn't mind betting that a lot of their advisers don't even know about it. For Total Heat Total Control, apparently there's only 1 mirror tariff available that they've found.

My next step will be to do some ringing around until I find out who offers a mirror tariff, as unhelpfully Ofgem don't seem to include this info in the report. If I have any success, I'll post an update.

This report also applies to East Midlands customers on E.On's Heatwise tariffs, although they didn't find any mirror tariffs.

I hope this info helps some folk understand the system and that allegedly it is sometimes possible to switch without changing meters.

- Anna

wavelets

help_me_im_lost wrote: »

I know that many folk have asked questions about the strange teleswitched tariffs of Comfort Plus Control, SSE's Total Heat Total Control and Heatwise from E.On. I'm with Scottish Power and have searched for this topic many times, and finally found some interesting information that I thought others might also find useful.

Ofgem published a report (reference 133/13) in July 2013 called "The state of the market for customers with dynamically teleswitched meters". It makes for interesting reading, although I skipped through to find the word "Comfort". There is a section about Scottish Power's teleswitched tariffs and a section about SSE's Total Heating Total Control. The gist is that for SP customers, the tariff isn't necessarily so bad and compares well to E7 & E10. I suspect this depends a lot on having everything set-up correctly, storage heaters functioning right, decent insulation & decent windows etc.

The other particularly interesting finding is that some of the big 6 suppliers offer "mirror" tariffs which tend to be a bit cheaper. So SP continue to control the teleswitching, but another supplier does the billing, introducing a small element of competition. They don't advertise this though, and I wouldn't mind betting that a lot of their advisers don't even know about it. For Total Heat Total Control, apparently there's only 1 mirror tariff available that they've found.

My next step will be to do some ringing around until I find out who offers a mirror tariff, as unhelpfully Ofgem don't seem to include this info in the report. If I have any success, I'll post an update.

This report also applies to East Midlands customers on E.On's Heatwise tariffs, although they didn't find any mirror tariffs.

I hope this info helps some folk understand the system and that allegedly it is sometimes possible to switch without changing meters.

- Anna

The general advice remains, if you have this type of supply, do not attempt to switch supplier unless you are prepared to accept the inevitable trouble that so many users on this site who have tried ended up with.

Most suppliers who know what they are doing will not accept you anyway.
And those suppliers that don't fully understand the implications that do initially agree are probably the ones you really do want to avoid.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/82288/state-market-customers-dynamically-teleswitched-meters.pdf

Very interesting. I suppose the main thing to take away is - if you're in this situation you're probably getting a better deal than the rest of us, so just keep with the status quo.

System

I take your point. But I think a lot of problems have been caused by both customers and call centre staff not understanding or knowing about the tariff options.

The point is that there are supposedly some genuine options, where previously most of the information seems to have suggested that it is simply not possible without changing meters.

I'm sure there've been a lot of call centre staff saying "yeah yeah sure" and then 3 weeks later "oh wait, no we can't" and making a total hash of it. So I'm not talking about a situation in which "suppliers who know what they're doing will not accept you" and it's only staff who don't know who try to effect a swap and screw it all up. There are 2500 customers in Southern Scotland on mirror tariffs, with their meters still under the control of SP but billed by a competitor. I'm not saying it's easy, I don't know yet. But it's worth asking harder questions and demanding clearer answers, but not from the first person who answers the phone.

But if customers do not know their options because companies don't advertise them and call centre staff aren't trained and told about them, then that just perpetuates the lack of choice and lack of competition.

So this is not a recommendation to switch, but a sharing of information from Ofgem that there are allegedly genuine options.

spiro

The other question is how these metering configurations fit with the new 4 tariff limit?
Also the government are looking to get rid of teleswitched metering so they can sell of the frequency it uses.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

Both of those answered in the OFGEM report - teleswitched meters are outside of the 4 tariff limit, and they're committed to the analogue frequency until smart meter deadline (2020).

Aquamania

spiro wrote: »

The other question is how these metering configurations fit with the new 4 tariff limit?

As I understand it, the limit of 4 different tariffs per supplier depends on the meter type you have.

i.e. for most suppliers they can actually offer 8 different tariffs; 4 x single rate meter and 4 x dual rate (E7) meter

Most suppliers who are compelled to continue these legacy tariffs to existing customers only have one such tariff for that metering configuartion.