Cheap Energy Club may have wrong data for Utilita gas

weakpassword

Your cheap energy club system is wicked, I started making a low-brow comparison system in an spreadsheet quite a while ago, but trying to find all the data of all the tariffs was a pain - let alone keeping up with changes. And I was only after a narrow selection of tariffs, not everything. I bet there are some really tedious jobs when it comes to maintaining CEC, I can only thank you for your graft.

Unless the energy companies are decent (yeah, I know...) and just do something nice and predictable like publish their prices by RSS off their homepage, all with a common schema (I think that's the right name for a data structure), and I just missed things? eg https://www.energybiller.tld/tariffs.xml. Just wget the files periodically, parse, update, customers get awesomeness. But no, I don't think they are doing this. Industry offering interoperability and using open standards? Hahaha, no chance.

So anyway, thanks for the hard work behind the scenes.


But Utilita's gas pricing is not normal, and I am not sure CEC reflects this.

We're on Smart Energy Prepayment for gas, and Utilita charge a higher unit price for the first x units per month, and that higher price is meant to cover the daily charge. If a customer does not use x units then they do not have to cover the cost of the daily charges that month.

Hmm, thinking about this this is annoying, come the start of January when I will be post-xmas broke and it will be cold I will be paying more per unit. They spin their unapproachable pricing as good for people, but this here is perfectly legitimate example of the complications leading to inconvenience and expense for the customer.

And of course in the summer when little gas is used customers will be paying more than the headline figure for unit prices, the price they are likely to think they are paying.

They recently wrote to say gas prices were going down, the letter says to 4.284p/kWh and 20.990p/day. At some point I wrote down 5.326p/kWh for first x units, and I think I have been told otherwise x is 244 or 224 units when speaking to them recently about their crappy services.

I'm not sure CEC can work accurately with this pricing, I think more data would need to go in, the exact number of units used per month over as long a period as possible? Thinking about how to implement their pricing in my spreadsheet, it is probably beyond my abilities, but my spreadsheet was reliant on constant daily charges and predictable unit prices. It determined units used from the money spent, with Utilita's structure the amount spent is proportional to the units used, and the unit price is proportional to the amount spent. Great, they feed back into each other.

MSE_Dan_L

Hi Weakpassword

Thanks for the post here. However I'm not convinced that the information you've got on Utilita's current tariffs are quite right.

Back in 2014, Ofgem brought in new regulations around tariffs which prevented different unit rates according to the amount of energy used used. Instead a tariff could have two main elements, a daily standing charge and the price per unit used (plus discounts such as online billing and dual fuel).

So it shouldn't be necessary to build in the calculations which you describe (although I believe the site's calculations are capable of handling this).

I hope this helps to reassure you.

Nada666

Technically, you would usually pay less for gas under a two-tier tariff over summer. That is, although the tier 1 price is higher, if, say, only using for water from a combi-boiler then your usage would not enter the lower tier 2 price - but that means you do not pay the whole standing charge. So it used to cost you less.

SoWhatIsNext

It's one tier.

You pay a unit price for your gas/elec.

The standing charge is split between your first (I believe) 50 kwh used per month. So if you don't use 50 kwh in a month, you don't pay the full standing charge.

If you do use 50 kwh, then the price you see is the price you pay.

So basically, you get a discount if you're an ultra low user as you're not paying all the standing charge.

Thunderballs_2

We just switched the gas to utilita after being on electricity with a smart meter for a year.

One of the main reasons for swapping to this Utilita tariff/service is we use very little gas. I used 18p to test the boiler when the engineer fitted the new meter and a couple of p on gas for cooking yesterday !

We don't centrally heat (for more than a few days a year- electric throw does the mrs and my layer of lard and heat from TV/computer does for me) or use hot water heated by gas (electric shower).

It remains to be seen what the costs are eventually, but we were on a daily tariff prepayment with npower and before, there was nothing in it v swapping - although the smart meter is useful for convenience and motivation to save ...

The tariff isnt that easy to understand given reference to smart energy plus etcs , but the numbers on the smart meter will soon tell the tale