Tomato Energy (Electric Only Supplier) - Too Good To Be True ?

cfw1994

MWT said:

Newbie_John said:

@MWT link please

My emails says otherwise.
MSE website says:
Once the transfer is complete, British Gas has said it's planning to offer an exclusive tariff to Tomato Energy customers. 

Here is the link for the business customers I referred to earlier:

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/tomato-energy

Going to have to wait just a little longer for the consumer tariff details, but there is no way that BG are going to suddenly offer a bunch of HH ToU tariffs that they do not currently have so I'd expect the 'exclusive' tariff to look a lot like the SVT with possibly a small discount for an initial period before reverting to SVT if you don't pick a different existing tariff (...or switch away). 

Interesting.
SMETS2 meters can, AIUI, be an Economy 7 meter.  That yields a different tariff 🤣
That said, I am sure we aren’t on that….& even their E7 isn’t too competitive (Utility Warehouse beats it, & I believe you can *just* have electricity without any other ‘services’)

EssexHebridean

cfw1994 said:

MWT said:

Newbie_John said:

@MWT link please

My emails says otherwise.
MSE website says:
Once the transfer is complete, British Gas has said it's planning to offer an exclusive tariff to Tomato Energy customers. 

Here is the link for the business customers I referred to earlier:

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/tomato-energy

Going to have to wait just a little longer for the consumer tariff details, but there is no way that BG are going to suddenly offer a bunch of HH ToU tariffs that they do not currently have so I'd expect the 'exclusive' tariff to look a lot like the SVT with possibly a small discount for an initial period before reverting to SVT if you don't pick a different existing tariff (...or switch away). 

Interesting.
SMETS2 meters can, AIUI, be an Economy 7 meter.  That yields a different tariff 🤣
That said, I am sure we aren’t on that….& even their E7 isn’t too competitive (Utility Warehouse beats it, & I believe you can *just* have electricity without any other ‘services’)

In the first instance though it will come down to how your meter is designated currently I believe - so if your meter curently shows as E7 you will have been moved to the E7 variant, if it shows as single rate, then you'll be straight onto standard variable single rate. 

MWT

cfw1994 said:

MWT said:

Newbie_John said:

@MWT link please

My emails says otherwise.
MSE website says:
Once the transfer is complete, British Gas has said it's planning to offer an exclusive tariff to Tomato Energy customers. 

Here is the link for the business customers I referred to earlier:

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/tomato-energy

Going to have to wait just a little longer for the consumer tariff details, but there is no way that BG are going to suddenly offer a bunch of HH ToU tariffs that they do not currently have so I'd expect the 'exclusive' tariff to look a lot like the SVT with possibly a small discount for an initial period before reverting to SVT if you don't pick a different existing tariff (...or switch away). 

Interesting.
SMETS2 meters can, AIUI, be an Economy 7 meter.  That yields a different tariff 🤣
That said, I am sure we aren’t on that….& even their E7 isn’t too competitive (Utility Warehouse beats it, & I believe you can *just* have electricity without any other ‘services’)

E7 is typically just a different version of a tariff so the SVT will have both a single-rate and an E7 variant.

With the bulk transfer they will probably have just used the meter type recorded on the central data base to determine if the meter is supposed to be E7 or not. 

... and from the post earlier this morning it looks like the 'special' Tomato tariff is just their SVT as expected. 

These are for the Eastern region

amz1909

Jon1952 said:

Just switched to E.ON from Tomato (or rather trying to.....British Gas are blocking the move currently. They seem to think that taking on Tomato's few customers is a big deal (for a company with a churn of over a million a year...really?). The E.ON tariff is interesting, in that you get 6 hours at 'overnight' rate, and (if you link teir app to the car) charges the car - at times they determine - during the day - at night rates. You tell them when you need it full supposedly and it decides when to do it. Interesting bit is that during the 'car charge segments' all your house electricity is also at the cheap rate.

We will see how this works out......

the standing charge on this is 60p per day ... that does take some savings away ... have you calculated with normal tariff and see the difference pls 

Ildhund

MWT said:
... the 'special' Tomato tariff is just their SVT as expected. 

Thanks for posting those two tariffs simultaneously - it's not often we get to compare multi-rate to comparable single-rate.

According to my 'O' level maths, we can establish the break-even point at which E7 begins to be worth it:

(Day rate - single rate)/(Day rate - Night rate) = (33.507 - 26.529)/(33.507 - 14.140) = 6.978/19.367 = 0.36

So long as offpeak (Night) use is more than 36% of the total, E7 will be cheaper for someone with this choice. The 0.4p higher SC is not really significant.

Alex_ST

Alex_ST said:

Alex_ST said:

Mywatts went offline for me too on Sept 4 0:30 and hasn’t come back at all. Bright went offline 6th Sept. Who can I contact to troubleshoot this? Is there a central authority for the comms side? Doubt Tomato will be much help. Concerned they might intentionally not be collecting TOU data to bill at higher rate. 

Unfortunately, I was correct to be suspicious of this “failure”. Tomato fabricated HH data within their system for the missing period (most of Sept, October). They reversed my pattern of consumption from mostly off-peak to mostly peak which meant their calculated bills are massively artificially inflated. I obviously lodged a complaint but they denied everything. They also blocked access to the company who own the Bright app to try to prevent the discrepancy being detected. 

I disputed the bill and haven’t paid. 

I have downloaded all the data from mywatts and where they have fabricated readings it’s very obvious because (aside from the sudden shift in usage pattern) the precision of the data exceeds that supplied by the meter (9 decimal places vs 3 from actual meter readings). 

Question: is it possible that they have pushed this data back to the meter so the corruption is irreversible? If not, how do I go about accessing the real data? DCC have been useless. (What exactly is the point of having a central authority for smart meter data if this sort of thing is allowed to happen?)

Has anyone else who experienced the outage at the start of Sept had a similar problem? 

Is Senapt (who own the mywatts app & are presumably liable) still trading? 

Given this practice, please be aware that downloading “your” data from mywatts is no guarantee that you will be billed accurately. 

Update for anyone in similar circumstances. 

Tomato continue to reissue bills (some already paid) and are now including threats to cut me off if I don’t pay. They ask you to get in contact but do not acknowledge when you do.

I have been advised not to pay and that this behaviour is illegal. Tomato do not have a valid license to trade and only the administrator (yet to be appointed?) is authorised to collect debt. 

Tomato cannot cut off your energy supply so ignore their threats.  

You would think there would be some organisation you could report illegal & fraudulent activity in this industry to but apparently not. I fully expect the directors to get away scot free and just set up another company to do the same thing. The retail energy industry in this country is broken. 

For those worrying about being put on a very uncompetitive rate, I’ve been told that British Gas will offer a range of tariffs and backdate bills to the transfer date. 

MeteredOut

Alex_ST said:

Alex_ST said:

Alex_ST said:

Mywatts went offline for me too on Sept 4 0:30 and hasn’t come back at all. Bright went offline 6th Sept. Who can I contact to troubleshoot this? Is there a central authority for the comms side? Doubt Tomato will be much help. Concerned they might intentionally not be collecting TOU data to bill at higher rate. 

Unfortunately, I was correct to be suspicious of this “failure”. Tomato fabricated HH data within their system for the missing period (most of Sept, October). They reversed my pattern of consumption from mostly off-peak to mostly peak which meant their calculated bills are massively artificially inflated. I obviously lodged a complaint but they denied everything. They also blocked access to the company who own the Bright app to try to prevent the discrepancy being detected. 

I disputed the bill and haven’t paid. 

I have downloaded all the data from mywatts and where they have fabricated readings it’s very obvious because (aside from the sudden shift in usage pattern) the precision of the data exceeds that supplied by the meter (9 decimal places vs 3 from actual meter readings). 

Question: is it possible that they have pushed this data back to the meter so the corruption is irreversible? If not, how do I go about accessing the real data? DCC have been useless. (What exactly is the point of having a central authority for smart meter data if this sort of thing is allowed to happen?)

Has anyone else who experienced the outage at the start of Sept had a similar problem? 

Is Senapt (who own the mywatts app & are presumably liable) still trading? 

Given this practice, please be aware that downloading “your” data from mywatts is no guarantee that you will be billed accurately. 

Update for anyone in similar circumstances. 

Tomato continue to reissue bills (some already paid) and are now including threats to cut me off if I don’t pay. They ask you to get in contact but do not acknowledge when you do.

I have been advised not to pay and that this behaviour is illegal. Tomato do not have a valid license to trade and only the administrator (yet to be appointed?) is authorised to collect debt. 

Tomato cannot cut off your energy supply so ignore their threats.  

You would think there would be some organisation you could report illegal & fraudulent activity in this industry to but apparently not. I fully expect the directors to get away scot free and just set up another company to do the same thing. The retail energy industry in this country is broken. 

For those worrying about being put on a very uncompetitive rate, I’ve been told that British Gas will offer a range of tariffs and backdate bills to the transfer date. 

Are you saying that Tomato have issued bills after going into administration/losing their licence. What dates are on the bills?

masonic

Probably automated systems that have not yet been disabled.

Alex_ST

MeteredOut said:

Are you saying that Tomato have issued bills after going into administration/losing their licence. What dates are on the bills?

Yes. They have now re invoiced me for a bill that was paid (because my account was in credit) 5 times. The last time was yesterday (so after they’d gone into administration). I feel like I’m going insane. 

MWT

Alex_ST said:

I have been advised not to pay and that this behaviour is illegal. Tomato do not have a valid license to trade and only the administrator (yet to be appointed?) is authorised to collect debt. 

Tomato cannot cut off your energy supply so ignore their threats.  

The administrators have been appointed now.

It appears to be the same company that handled the Avro and People's Energy administration.