Cheery's country living adventure 11 March 2018 at 8:28AM in Mortgage-Free Wannabe 5.2K replies 341.9K views

greenbee

Bother.

I was hoping they'd make it. I'm seriously considering going off-grid... 

chicker

Hi Cheery,

I love the paint colour! Would love to see the finished room. I’m always looking for inspo as we have our whole house to decorate. 

Chicker 

EssexHebridean

Aahh heck - forgot you were with Bulb! Mind you I can't see it making a lot of odds for the forseeable - it seems unlikely that the Special Administration arrangement won't just continue through the winter at least. I suspect the energy market will have to stabilise a lot before any of the existing big 6 are going to be willing to consider taking those 1.7  million customers on! 

greenbee

While I understand the reasons for the energy cap, there clearly needs to be a mechanism to allow it to respond to market activity. If not, we might find the big six in real trouble soon... 

badmemory

We actually need one of the big six to go under.  That is the only way this government will do anything about it.  The smaller companies may be going under but the bigger (original) ones are raking it in.  We should also remember that the bulk of those profits are leaving the country.  That is what happens when you sell off essential services & let them be bought by anyone.  Between brexit & Maggie we have been well & truly done over.

greenbee

Those of the big six that are foreign-owned won't go under. If any of them does it will be Centrica or Ovo (which is smaller, and privately owned, so more likely to struggle). 

Scottish Power is now Spanish (Iberdrola)
EON & NPower are German
EDF is French

EssexHebridean

At the moment it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the big 6 are "raking it in" - it will be improving as more and more people fall off legacy fixes onto the SVR, but even the SVR is meaning a loss for every KWh of power we use at the moment. The majority of the small ones that have gone have done so because they tried too hard to gain customers at the expense of charging a viable rate. As someone said on the energy board earlier, if Bulb had put some of the vast sum of money they put into growing their customer base into hedging, they may well still be trading as normal!  

We were with Bulb a couple of years and in that time had £175 of referral bonus from them, and this of course was also paid to the people we referred - at last count it looks like every new customer was costing them over £100 - that's a big loss to be starting with, and all the more so where those new customers are - as in our case - relatively low users. 

Cheery_Daff

Not sure we'd count as a low user - apparently we used £121 worth of electricity this month! I suppose not a surprised with dehumidifier and power tools etc but I don't think we've had any plug in heaters on as the central heating has been working properly... Hey ho. Been advised to basically stay put and do nowt so that's what we'll do - I like instructions like that 😁

So. What else? Had to buy lunch at work yesterday, and I will NOT be doing it again - barely any choice and not cheap 🙄 We drove a 26 mile round trip to collect Mr Cheery's phone from the DIY shop where he left it at the weekend 🙄

No reply yet from the builder with a full invoice, but then I did only request it yesterday.

Worked at home today, got quite a bit done, but I struggled to concentrate through a 2 hour online meeting this afternoon... At home again tomorrow, and with four hours of meetings through the day - all perfectly cheerful but I don't have a very active role in the final one so may find myself doodling to stay awake.... 

Nothing much to report I don't think. Need to ring the dentist - another bit of my tooth chipped off today so it definitely needs sorting out now 🙄 In work on Thursday so need to think about lunch!

Other than that, chicken wrangling (aiming to have the two flocks mixed properly by the end of the weekend) and painting (aiming to have the bedroom completely finished by the end of the weekend, and the kitchen started!)

EssexHebridean

That's definitely not a low-user kind of figure is it! Hopefully it should start to even out a bit now mind you as the building work is coming to an end. Fingers crossed anyway! 

Also with you on liking "just do nothing" instructions. It's frustrating to have hands tied that there's nothing that we can do to cut costs - partly I think because that's an unknown situation after the last few years, but equally considering ourselves very lucky that we can afford the extra, there are plenty of folk out there really worried about it aren't there, and understandably so.  

Cheery_Daff

It sounds from what Martin said like there isn't a cheaper option we could move to anyway at this point 🙄