Moving home and taking tariff with me

macman

Very misleading advice from the NPower rep, I would have expected better. If their own staff don't understand the deemed contract system, how can anyone else be expected to?

MWT

macman said:

Very misleading advice from the NPower rep, I would have expected better. If their own staff don't understand the deemed contract system, how can anyone else be expected to?

There are a few suppliers offering this as a 'service', I suspect they may be taking over the deemed contract themselves then handling the switch.

I still wouldn't recommend it though, too many ways for it to go wrong without the customer knowing about it...

brewerdave

MWT said:

macman said:

Very misleading advice from the NPower rep, I would have expected better. If their own staff don't understand the deemed contract system, how can anyone else be expected to?

There are a few suppliers offering this as a 'service', I suspect they may be taking over the deemed contract themselves then handling the switch.

I still wouldn't recommend it though, too many ways for it to go wrong without the customer knowing about it...

A bit like the early days of transferring internet service providers - too many times ,the new supplier "forgot" to tell the old ISP, resulting in bills being raised by both companies !!!

MWT

brewerdave said:

A bit like the early days of transferring internet service providers - too many times ,the new supplier "forgot" to tell the old ISP, resulting in bills being raised by both companies !!!

So true

I was part of the Oftel/Ofcom working group that finally got the migration process working properly, that was an interesting experience.

RelievedSheff

MWT said:

macman said:

Very misleading advice from the NPower rep, I would have expected better. If their own staff don't understand the deemed contract system, how can anyone else be expected to?

There are a few suppliers offering this as a 'service', I suspect they may be taking over the deemed contract themselves then handling the switch.

I still wouldn't recommend it though, too many ways for it to go wrong without the customer knowing about it...

When we moved last year EDF who were the supplier at our previous property handled the switch and became our supplier at our new property. It all went really very smoothly.

Although a few months later we ended up switching to BG onto a much cheaper tariff who were the original supplier to the developers.

MWT

RelievedSheff said:

When we moved last year EDF who were the supplier at our previous property handled the switch and became our supplier at our new property. It all went really very smoothly.

Unfortunately we've also had examples on here where the customer finds out several weeks or months later that the switch didn't go through properly and they have been on a default tariff with the incumbent supplier all that time...

This is why we always suggest do it the 'official' way and not taking shortcuts.

macman

The point is that, even if the outgoing provider does handle the whole thing properly and migrates you onto their supply at the new property, it still goes via the deemed contract route, for which period the occupier must pay the existing provider, and a new account is created at the new property.
The NPower rep's post strongly implies otherwise to the uninitiated, by just blithely saying that 'you can transfer the services over', as if it were nothing more than registering a change of address on an existing account.

Talldave

It looks to be irresponsible advice from npower, but hardly surprising in my book. npower are the only energy company I refuse to deal with after a year long battle over a replacement meter many years ago.  Not sorry to see them go, however, I'm not sure whether Eon should now be on the refusal list?!