Bulb Energy Reviews: Give your feedback on the energy supplier

Telegraph_Sam

That was the experience of myself and others at Tonik: Increases in advance of winter, no corresponding decreases later, regardless of one's credit balance. At one point I cancelled my D/D until a reasonable balance was restored, others are of the opinion that this violates the conditions of the contract. It is possible to get your bank to reclaim a D/D payment without cancelling the D/D arrangement itself, but they always advise you to "negotiate" i.e. protest with the supplier also.

ace33

Darkslider said:

What does everyone else think about their policy of increasing the DD to go into winter with substantial credit? As all our heating and hot water is via LPG I'm not anticipating a huge rise in electricity consumption from switching led lights on a few hours earlier, yet they want to increase our DD from £36 to £50 a month.

I like Bulb's ethos but if the Guardian is correct I'm not sure I fancy bankrolling their expansion plans into the US' tech company market, I'd much rather switch to Octopus.

I think its ridiculous, we are the same but oil not LPG. 

My account is £32 in credit currently, they suggest we are using £143 p/month and want to put it up to £211 to cover the price increase and to build my credit up for winter.

Last night I started the switch to Neon Reef. 

waamo

 Bye bye Bulb. Sadly they have priced themselves out of the market for me. I also dislike the way they announced the price increase. Personally I feel they should email all their customers rather than stick a notice on their website 

pchelpman

Agreed waamo. Not only the price increases but their "customer services" has fallen off a cliff. 
I left for pastures new today (i.e. Octopus).

waamo

pchelpman said:

Agreed waamo. Not only the price increases but their "customer services" has fallen off a cliff. 
I left for pastures new today (i.e. Octopus).

Ditto. Octopus look the most competitive for me too.

RBagworth

I honestly thought Bulb was different to the Big 6, where my experience of NPower and ScottishPower, was that they were completely incompetent at forecasting monthly payments on the basis of historical usage.

Alas Bulb has demonstrated themselves to be no different. For 9 months I have religiously submitted meter readings on time, and each time I have received the satisfying confirmation that my account is fine and everything is on track. What a warm comfortable feeling that gave me.

In fact, I was looking forward to an eventual decrease in my monthly bill as for the first 2 months of the year I was daily using about 22kwh of electricity to charge my EV. But from the end of February, I moved to home working and the car is being charged much less frequently.

I’d heard that Bulb were bucking the current trend by actually increasing their prices, and so I was not surprised to receive the email notifying me of the price increase. For me this was an additional £22.12 a month; a 7% increase in my current monthly payment. Imagine my surprise when I read further down the email to find I hadn’t been paying enough each month and in addition to the £22.12 increase, they were going to slap me with an additional £55.46 ‘to stop me going further into debt’ (I’m currently £18 in debt).

It makes you wonder how this is possible. My electricity consumption, when I joined Bulb, was 30,000kwh a year. Sounds a lot, I know, but this covered main property useage, an adjacent rental property on shared supply and daily charging of EV. The rental property ceased being let in April and the EV charging is greatly diminshed. My own spreadsheet tracker show’s my forecast annual useage, using the previous 9 months data, is on target for 22,000kwh.

So I’ve reduced my annual consumption by 8,000kwh and then received a 17% monthly increase to stop me going further into debt. At the same time being reassured each month that I’m on target. The only conclusion you can reach is that Bulb undersold the monthly price at the start to win the custom.

Moneysupermarket advises a switch to GNE Family Green 12 Month Fixed V8 could save me £342 a year based on above forecast consumption, no brainer.....

UnclaimedEnergy

I can't see what Bulb now offers as a supplier which makes them different from anyone else.

They're no longer cheap and are now one of the most expensive. Instead of comparing their price to the market they're now comparing their tariffs to the price cap.

They advertise themselves as a tech company, however they don't actually own any of their own tech... Furthermore they're falling behind Octopus by a ridiculous amount in this aspect, who are already selling off their own tech.

Their customer service is getting worse and worse, with their complaints per 100,000 customers rising every quarter.

Green wise, they're barely more green than the majority of suppliers on the market. Sure they meet their demand with 20% PPA contracts, however this is hardly anything when you consider that Scottish Power supply 100% renewable through their wind farms which they built and own themselves.

If you're with Bulb and would not consider switching away at all, please could you comment to say why? I'm really interested to know what is motivating people to stay with Bulb and not consider switching.

m4n5f

We have moved to a new supplier as the pre paid meter requires cash payments which during Covid means visiting two places, one for cash and one to top up. 

We received statements showing a credit balance.
 Bulb refused to believe we had had these statements then refused to send one which covers the last month of usage, as customers on prepaid meters don’t get them!
We sent proof of the statements but Bulb are now ignoring emails. 

Terrible service. 

pchelpman

Just got the email about Bulb increasing their overall price so our direct debit needs to go up.
Also got their "Sorry you're leaving" email today with the usual "Please let us know if there's anything we can do to make Bulb better"
Well....duh.....stop with the price increases would be a good start.

UnclaimedEnergy

pchelpman said:

Just got the email about Bulb increasing their overall price so our direct debit needs to go up.
Also got their "Sorry you're leaving" email today with the usual "Please let us know if there's anything we can do to make Bulb better"
Well....duh.....stop with the price increases would be a good start.

When did they say the price increase would begin from? don't they normally need to give 30 days notice or something like that for a price increase?