Pre paid meters

billyolly

My son and his girl friend use a pre paid meter for there electricity and gas .I am try to get them to pay by direct debit. Can any body tell me what the average cost is using pre paid meters as opposed to paying monthly plese

[Deleted User]

A rough guess, as the price varies throughout the country, is approx 25% less with cheapest 1 year fix paid by direct debit compared to prepays.Daily standing charges can be cheaper also.

sniggings

depends how much they use, I believe you only save a small percentage for paying by direct debit,the gas/electric costs are the same, with British Gas, think it's less than 10%, so maybe £100 more on a meter, if they spend £1000 on fuel a year, so not that much really, remember if they are not good at paying direct debits, a missed one will mean bank charges,so the saving would be even smaller...these days meters are not that bad really.

[Deleted User]

Just as an example, only today I was looking at a customers bills. He was on BG standard tariff ( same as prepay ) was paying 4.8 p/kwhr gas + 25 dsc and 13.4 p/kwhr electric +25p dsc. with Eons latest 1 year v12 fix gas is 3.5 p/kwhr +22pdsc and electric is10.8 p/kwhr +15p dsc...thats a big difference , at least 25% less on gas . The elderly gent was nt on the internet and not a fan of direct debits so was paying top dollar as usual. There are big savings in getting off the high price and inconvenience of prepays. This gent had his annual usage of 13000 kwhr gas and 2400 kwhr electric so was an average user
Running those figure through UKpower.co.uk revealed a yearly saving of £296 over BG standard tariff

Nada666

On paper the headline saving is typically only 6%. In practice, with access to more tariffs, savings can easily be 15% and up to 25 to 30%.

Of course you have to want to and be prepared to accommodate the vagaries - you need to avoid bank charges and you need to realise you may have a 50% increase in instalment now and then. The net cost will be cheaper and you won't be cutting yourself off in winter because you haven't saved in advance for the prepayment meter. But they have to be prepared.