Electricity Only User Prejudice

aaccandy

Why can suppliers, including all those recommended via the various switching sites, only quote for electricity only customers who can forecast the amount of electricity required for heating their hot water?
What!
I am not an electrician so how on earth I am expected be able to answer that rather daft and dare I say rather technical question?
Or am the only customer who has been asked this ridiculous question?

aleph_0

aaccandy wrote: »

Why can suppliers, including all those recommended via the various switching sites, only quote for electricity only customers who can forecast the amount of electricity required for heating their hot water?
What!
I am not an electrician so how on earth I am expected be able to answer that rather daft and dare I say rather technical question?
Or am the only customer who has been asked this ridiculous question?

It's not a particularly technical question. You're wanting to shop around for a thing, the best way to do this would be to know the quantity of the thing you want.

Do you have any old bills/readings, can you work out what your actual consumption is? That would be the best way to shop around.

If you don't, which's comparison tool: https://switch.which.co.uk/index.html?db=electric , and probably others, will calculate an estimate for what a typical household like you use. Once you've got this figure, you can put it in anywhere else you're looking for a quote.

Maybe some providers are being cautious about providing estimation tools since the amount used, and thus cost can vary wildly from household to household, and so they want to avoid accusations of misleading claims, or being too cautious and scaring people off with high numbers?

geordie_joe

aleph_0 wrote: »

It's not a particularly technical question.

It is for me, I would not have a clue how much electricity I use for heating my water. I know how much gas it uses, and that it doesn't work if the leccy is not on, but not how much leccy it uses.

aleph_0 wrote: »

You're wanting to shop around for a thing, the best way to do this would be to know the quantity of the thing you want.

Yes but surely you just need to know the total amount you want, not how much you want for heating water and how much you want for everything else.

aleph_0 wrote: »

Do you have any old bills/readings,

I've got loads but not one of them tells me how much electricity went to the gas boiler. In fact none of them tell me where any of it went, apart from into my house.

aleph_0 wrote: »

can you work out what your actual consumption is?

Yep, it tells me on my annual bill. I can also take meter readings.

Maybe I should just unplug everything except the boiler and watch the meter?

matelodave

All comparison site ask you for an estimate of your consumption whether it's gas or electricity.

You can either use information from your previous bills, tell them how much you've been paying or say you don't know and they will try and estimate either by asking you some questions or making a wild guess, usually based on national average consumptions.

The most accurate it to use your previous consumption in kwh, using payment info is much less accurate and a wild guess is just that.

Are you all electric and that means heating, hot water, cooking etc. What size of property are you in, how well insulated is it, what sort of heating system do you have. Do you heat the house all day or just in the evenings & weekends. Do you have Economy 7 & storage heaters. All these will make a difference to your consumption and consequently your bill.

Every 1000kwh will cost you between £130 - £150 on a single rate fixed tariff, more if you go onto a suppliers standard variable tariff possibly less if you are on E7 and can use a lot of your energy overnight during the low cost period. You don't have to be far out before you end up either over or underpaying by several hundred pounds a year.

If you think the questions are daft or technical then you are not going to get the best tariff and you could end up with wildly inaccurate direct debit payments so it's worth putting a bit of effort into making some estimates.

aleph_0

geordie_joe wrote: »

It is for me, I would not have a clue how much electricity I use for heating my water. I know how much gas it uses, and that it doesn't work if the leccy is not on, but not how much leccy it uses.

The OP was talking about an electric-only user. Ok, perhaps the OP has come across a really stupid comparison site/supplier. Asking for either some lifestyle data to estimate usage, or total usage - perhaps split into day/night meter readings is sensible. If the OP can provide a link to a provider asking for superfluous data, then that would be good to see.

My understanding from the fact that the OP said "all those recommended via the various switching sites" - which I'm pretty sure is false - was that the OP wasn't literally meaning this, but just meaning they were asking for mysterious usage data. Even that's not true though - british gas are happy to estimate based on some lifestyle questions.

Bark01

An personalised estimate of your consumption should be shown in the right hand column on page 2 of any bill.

Use this consumption, you shouldn't need to answer any lifestyle questions.

Nada666

As to prejudice the reality is the contrary - it is people seeking a gas-only tariff who can be stopped. Pretty much every dual fuel tariff can be subscribed to electricity-only by someone with just an electricity supply. As such they can occasionally grab a bargain that is being subsidised by an unneeded complementary gas tariff. The cheapest gas prices, though, may be restricted to a customer only if they also take the electricity supply on the same tariff.