GB Energy Supply reviews: Give your feedback

djwoolcott

Made the decision to leave Eon for Gb Energy - first time I have gone for a company outside the big six - and so far I have no complaints. Changeover should be through soon, but everything seems good, and I shall be saving money after being on an Eon MSE Collective rate for the past year. Will keep you posted if I experience any problems, but I shall be recommending this company to my elderly mother based on experience so far

bpietras

Gas usage seems uniform, until the visit of an EDF engineer, who took a reading in July which was LOWER than my previous email, causing the system to enter that I had gone 'around the clock' with the meter in the space of one month.

The meter was then set to a much higher reading - the trend suggests it should be at 14,000 - but it is actually at 19,000.

This means that in the blink of an eye my £550 credit has changed to a £1700 debit!

Has anyone else found similar behaviour following the unexpected visit of an EDF engineer?

JJ_Egan

EDF engineer fiddled meter?

What has this to do with GB Energy thread ??

sd99

Update on my switch:

04-Aug - Registered with GBES
05-Aug - Received welcome pack
01-Sep - First payment taken
03-Sep - First meter reading requested
04-Sep - Supplied meter reading
21-Sep - Final bill for EDF confirming switch date was on 02-Sep with the reading I supplied GBES.

So that's it - I've been using GPES supplied electricity since the 02-Sep and all seems well. We'll have to wait and see how good the reading / billing system is. £170 cheaper so def worth it.

I think I'll wait to supply meter readings until requested given history I've read here...

pastymuncher

I have been with GBEnergy for around 14 months now and sadly they seem to be having problems on a weekly basis. They state when you submit a question to them by email that they will answer within 2 days but this has never happened with me. It's either been no reply at all or in my latest question to them, 8 days. Nine times out of ten when you finally get through to someone on the phone they tell you straight away that they have a problem with their systems and to phone back the next day. If they are having problems this regularly why can't they put a recorded message on the line when you first connect instead of being on hold for ages listening to some awful music? They have been having system problems for over a week now as I have been trying to get a refund of my £251 credit and there is always a problem on their end.
The billing has always been spot on up until a couple of months ago when they stopped billing me. After phoning them up and complaining this has now been rectified and I am being billed monthly again. While they are the cheapest supplier for me I just cannot recommend changing to them at the moment just for the never ending problems they seem to have with their systems.

Mr_K

Just to say i've been with them over a year and had no problems. Still the cheapest by far. Don't understand why people need to contact their providers so regularly, just make sure your DD is right to start with, give regular meter readings, and things like customer service is irrelevant as there should be little need to contact anybody.

KingS6

Mr_K wrote: »

Just to say i've been with them over a year and had no problems. Still the cheapest by far. Don't understand why people need to contact their providers so regularly, just make sure your DD is right to start with, give regular meter readings, and things like customer service is irrelevant as there should be little need to contact anybody.

I second this. Switched with them on EU referendum day. Deal got pulled the next day. (Topaz Tariff) Still the cheapest on the market and I would pay more with anyone else. Likely will be the cheapest still until the deal runs out in July 2017.

Taking a direct debit in advance and the winter direct payments being a different amount to the summer payments is irrelevant for me as I will always budget accordingly and so can anyone else. Just remember to work out the mean amount

Customer service has been bob on with the small energy suppliers for me.

Freephone number to boot!

victor2

Mr_K wrote: »

Just to say i've been with them over a year and had no problems. Still the cheapest by far. Don't understand why people need to contact their providers so regularly, just make sure your DD is right to start with, give regular meter readings, and things like customer service is irrelevant as there should be little need to contact anybody.

But what do you do when they adjust your DD amount to an unreasonable amount above or below what your are paying - when you know you are paying enough to cover your predicted annual usage?
Circumstances like that are when customer service becomes very relevant.

Mr_K

victor2 wrote: »

But what do you do when they adjust your DD amount to an unreasonable amount above or below what your are paying - when you know you are paying enough to cover your predicted annual usage?
Circumstances like that are when customer service becomes very relevant.

If you can be bothered argue the toss, but I'd just switch to someone else and start again with a DD I'm happy with. No shortage of suppliers and no cancellation charge with GB energy.

horatiog

Hi,

I'm in the process of switching my mother (for whom I'm a PoA), to a new electricity supplier. I am going to switch her to GB Energy and the actual sign-up process with them has not been TOO bad.

However, the lead-up to this point has been a nightmare.

My mother is currently with Eon under the MSE Collective Sept 2015 tariff.

They started informing me that the tariff was about to expire on 11th October about a month ago - So far so good. However, I was hoping to swap with the MSE Collective again, so decided to postpone the swap until the new round of collective swap opened at the end of September - Mistake!

Once the new Collective Swap opened, I immediately found out that there were no decent deals for "Electricity Only" customers. Most of the folk in the North of Scotland have no option to be anything but "Electricity Only" customers as there is NO mains gas supply!

So, I immediately set about trying to swap my mother to another tariff using the main cheapenergyclub website and other price comparison websites. And I found out that my best swap was to going to be to another of Eon's tariffs the "Saver Plus Fixed 1 Year v2 Online". After a huge amount of mucking about by Eon (which included them "losing" my previously registered mother's PoA, then insisting we re-submit it by POST, and get my mother to verbally authorise our use of the PoA!!!!), we found out that Eon were not prepared to offer my mother this tariff. Apparently that tariff was only open to "new" customers, a process which I believed that OFGEM had prohibited since 2012. I challenged this and it took another week to escalate this all the way up to their CEO; whereupon it turned out that they had been allowed to start this "bait & switch" scam again, brought back in along with the 2015 legislation intended to restrict and simplify their tariffs.

Eon's "next best offering" for their existing customers was extortionate, meaning that my mother's annual bill would rise by 42%; something that, as a 91 year old pensioner, she can ill afford. So I looked into what tariffs other suppliers were offering. At this point I should note that my mother was in receipt of a Warm Front Discount from EOn, worth £140 annually. Naively (I guess), I assumed that, since this was a Government backed scheme, the eligibility criteria would be consistent across all suppliers. Therefore I chose the "Online Fixed Price Energy Sept 2017 v2" tariff from Scottish Power, and started the application process. However, after several rounds of discussion with SP (much complicated by the fact that I had to again register my PoA with them to discuss the application that I myself had carried out!), it turns out my mother was NOT eligible for the Warm Front Discount with Scottish Power. Further investigation reveals that beyond a "core group" of pensioners on Guaranteed Pension Credit, the suppliers can make up their own rules about who can receive this rebate! Although my mother receives a 100% Council Tax rebate due to her dementia, and is actually falls in the official definition of being in Fuel Poverty, her widows pensions take her just over the cut-off maximum annual income to qualify with SP. So the loss of the £140 rebate immediately meant that SP were, by far, not the cheapest option for my mother.

So I have now had to cancel the SP swap. And re-apply to transfer my mother to GB Energy. I had some issues here as well. Tried to do this online last night. But it let me get right through the process before informing there was a "problem" and I would have to phone them the following morning. When I phoned, of course, they wouldn't talk to me until I had submitted the PoA. At least they would allow me to do this by email and that only took around 30 mins - kudos for that. However, once we worked right through the application, I was then told that the transfer process would take 5 weeks!!!! Two of these weeks were a "cooling-off" period which doesn't even run con-concurrently with the transfer process and, apparently, which we cannot opt out of.

So my mother is now going to be subjected to 4 weeks of EOn's most expensive "default" tariff until she can be transferred to GB Energy, and even then, she is going to be subjected to an overall 35% increase in energy bill in the coming year. (Last Year: £715 - £140 rebate = £575. This Year (Assuming same consumption): £780 - £0 )

So, it appears to me that all this work that the Government has carried out to make the transfer between energy suppliers easier, more fair and more transparent, has been so twisted and turned by the suppliers, that most of the measures actually seem to have been by-passed or used against the consumer in the end!

Lessons learned?: Don't wait for a potential better tariff coming down the line - there's a good chance you will be disappointed. You need to start the transfer process as soon as your penalty period ceases, because transfer can take up to 5 weeks!