First Utility Cold Called

aphill24

Hi, I had a cold call from an agent of first utility. I signed up with him as he said the figures I gave on my energy usage would bring my monthly payment down to £70 pm from the £99 I pay with EDF. I then received an email with the details of the contract and he has only put in my gas usage as £105 for the whole year, know wonder it's come out cheaper. I used £427 of gas last year.
I rang them to cancel but after twenty minutes and being passed through to another dept i gave up.
I have emailed their customer services to inform them of my intent to cancel the contract under the cooling off period and would like a reply from them to keep as a record.
Does this seem enough? and just wanted to point out the nasty tactic used to get the price down. It would have cost me more than what I am on now and a £100 exit fee on top.

System

Keep a record of your e-mail and press First Utility for confirmation that your switch has been cancelled. I would also call my present supplier and ask them to block all attempts to take over the supply.

I worry when people do energy comparisons based just on £s as it is a hostage to fortune. The only way to calculate an accurate annual cost is to base your calculation on your projected annual usage in kWhs/year.

As far as First Utility is concerned, it would only have been a nasty tactic if they had stood by their earlier quote. My guess is that when they received the historical usage data for your property from industry (known as the EAC and AQ), they looked again at your annual cost and informed you accordingly via the Welcome E-Mail. The purpose of the cooling off period is to give you time to review the contract detail which you clearly have done.

https://www.first-utility.com/help/bills-and-payments/how-do-you-estimate-my-usage

The moral here is do not agree anything over the phone; on the doorstep or in the street.

aphill24

Thanks Hengus, I gave the data we used in Kwph but obviously he didn't put the correct figure in for gas. Lesson learnt.