Smart meters....yay or nay?

jazzyja

Just recently bought a house and it has smart meters....look like they belong to British gas. My old house I just had monthly direct debit with edf (their prices are astronomical) so I want to leave. I know energy prices are rubbish at the minute but bulb are offering smart meters £132 a month. I've heard mixed reviews....should I avoid? 

Carrot007

Smart meters are just meters. They make no diffrence to anything except the ability to stop readers coming in and getting actual reads.

Meters will need changing soon enough anyway (around every 10 years now due to cheap crap instead of 25/30 years but cheap enough to be the better olption) and that is all you will get.

What you want right now though is anyone's standards tarrif as it is below cost and the cheapest. Any fix is above it.

Verdigris

Yay! The way forward.

jazzyja

Carrot007 said:

Smart meters are just meters. They make no diffrence to anything except the ability to stop readers coming in and getting actual reads.

Meters will need changing soon enough anyway (around every 10 years now due to cheap crap instead of 25/30 years but cheap enough to be the better olption) and that is all you will get.

What you want right now though is anyone's standards tarrif as it is below cost and the cheapest. Any fix is above it.

Thanks for this!

So avoid any fixed....go for standard....please can you tell me if this is a the right tariff? Because it doesn't give me any other option of fixed and standard

Ultrasonic

The first thing you need to do is find out who your current supplier is. Have you done so?

Oh, and take meter readings if you haven't already.

Staying with your current supplier may well be a perfectly decent plan right now.

Ultrasonic

In case it's helpful:

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/information-consumers/energy-advice-households/finding-your-energy-supplier-or-network-operator

Carrot007

Ultrasonic said:

Staying with your current supplier may well be a perfectly decent plan right now.

Indeed OP pretty much this. Standard Variable is capped and the same for all suppliers. Tehre is nothing to gain by switching. On a fixed myself under Jan so hoping it chanegs as my current offered £500 more min and the best on the marklet was £300 more min.

All we can do at the moment is use less. (though it has only gone up to the standard elsewhere so it may well stay there, whatever people on here say the UK has had cheap elec/gas compared to almost anywhere else).

jazzyja

Thanks everyone.

So are all suppliers rates currently similar at the minute so there's zero point in me changing? 

Ultrasonic

jazzyja said:

Thanks everyone.

So are all suppliers rates currently similar at the minute so there's zero point in me changing? 

It's impossible for you to make a comparison until you know who your current supplier is and what their tariff charges are...

The price cap doesn't mean all standard varialble tariffs (SVT) are identical, although the closer you are to the the assumed 'typical' usage the smaller differences can be. In practice the Bulb tariff you were looking at is about the only SVT just about worth considering switching too if you wanted to though.

Fixed tariffs are getting harder to find and their prices are only going up. Lots more smaller providers are predicted to go bust over the coming months so I wouldn't take a chance on one personally. There have even been questions raised over Bulb's future come to that if you want to Google.

lohr500

To answer your initial question, I am a fan of smart meters. In our case a smart electricity meter opened the door to a range of "time of use" tariffs that were unavailable with a conventional or old style Economy 7 meter. I still check the readings manually every now and then just to make sure the billing is correct and so I can keep an eye on our usage.

peter_the_piper

Our smart meter is very useful as it gives the meter readings to me even though my last company did not use smarties. As the meters are in very difficult to get at places they save me a lot of hassle.