Possibly daft question regards energy price cap

Mistermeaner

Hi

I sort out my elderly fathers bills for him as well as my own - we are both now defaulted onto the variable 'capped' deals qwith our respective providers; me octopus, him eon

Just out of interest today i checked the rates that ecah are charging and they are similar but slightly different:


Octopus:
                
Gas            26.11/day       4.02/unit
Elec            23.5/day        21.08/unit


Eon:
Gas            26.12/day       4.07/unit
Elec            23.5/day        22/unit


While not huge differences at my typical usages this makes octopus favourable by £19/year..... not life changing but interesting

I would have thought that if there's a cap there's a cap and the amount is set in stone.... how can suppliers have different charging rates? I've not checked around but presume others will all be slightly different as well

EssexHebridean

Are you both in the same supply area?  But regardless - nope, it's NOT a hard and fast "you must charge this" - some suppliers opt to charge a little under, and there is flexibility as to how they split the costs over cap/SC as well I believe. what they can't do is charge an amount that for that fictional average household would come in at above the monetary value of the current cap. 

(On my current annual E7 electric use I've calculated I could save C£12 a year by switching to EDF - but there are so many variables involved that we have decided that is simply not enough to make it worth the hassle of the switch, right now.)

MWT

Mistermeaner said:

I would have thought that if there's a cap there's a cap and the amount is set in stone.... how can suppliers have different charging rates? I've not checked around but presume others will all be slightly different as well

Octopus have said they are going to charge a little less than the cap for existing customers, that would not apply to new customers switching to them...

I suspect your numbers don't include that reduction so your bill will actually be a little cheaper than you expect.

.. but the sort of differences you are seeing are really just down to rounding of the numbers, and not unusual.

There are also variations between regions, but your are close enough to be in the same region.