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

Newbie_John

Doc_N said:

Currently an Octopus Tracker customer (electricity only having ditched gas for an Octopus fix at 29.43p/5.74p a few days ago).  Octopus Tracker is getting increasingly more expensive (regardless of wholesale prices) as Octopus get greedier and jack up the conversion formula.  So good to see a competitor in the market.

Played around a bit on Tomato but I have to say their Lifestyle (East Midlands) doesn't look too appealing. Have they pushed their prices up?

 

You're doing the most common mistakes on their website. There is 8 different Lifestyle tarrifs what's not obvious at all - some of them are pointless like the "solar" one you selected - if you don't select anything to customise your tarrif you get the same periods much cheaper. Selecting EV and battery gets you 6h at 5p rate but you swap 20:30:22:30 for 22:00-0:00 and I think rates are 1p more expensive in general? Another good one is as @masonic points out - selecting Pensioner - gets you long peak rates at 15p. Other don't make much sense.

SJMALBA

Newbie_John said:

Chrysalis said:

Lifestyle tariff deffo looks interesting, at first glass assuming they can do variable DD, then risk should be low, but the posts indicating TOU errors is concerning.

I might email Octopus and tell them of my intentions, give Octopus the chance to give me an exception to join Cosy to keep me as an electric customer.

They do variable DD, 2 paid already.
TOU errors are gone for most, some ppl on SMETS1 who joined in early days still waiting for their bills but they get 15% for 3 months delay, 30% for 6 months delay.. discount. Anyway, no new SMETS1 allowed.

My IHD works fine showing live data. MyWatts gets updates every 3h at ...9am, 12, 3pm.. so it's almost live data.

Anyway, till mid November it was quite worrying for me as nothing worked - all sorted now and it's quite boring especially after being on Agile for a while - I don't care anymore - everything is scheduled to run 0-6am, don't need to check rates, bills cover full month 1-31 unlike Octopus was in my case 26-25th.. 

My only worry now is - will they drop the 5p tarrif in a year time?

Do they automatically bill on the basis of whole calendar months, or did you have to request it?
Was your first bill for the remainder of the switch month (unless you happened to switch on the 1st), then whole calendar month after that?

TIA

crumpet_man

I switched last week of November and first bill covered end of November and all of December.

Others who have had several bills reported it is per calendar month.  

Billing per calendar month is the default, I don't think there is option to choose anything else.

SJMALBA

crumpet_man said:

I switched last week of November and first bill covered end of November and all of December.

Others who have had several bills reported it is per calendar month.  

Billing per calendar month is the default, I don't think there is option to choose anything else.

Excellent - calendar month is what I'm after! 

Doc_N

Newbie_John said:

Doc_N said:

Currently an Octopus Tracker customer (electricity only having ditched gas for an Octopus fix at 29.43p/5.74p a few days ago).  Octopus Tracker is getting increasingly more expensive (regardless of wholesale prices) as Octopus get greedier and jack up the conversion formula.  So good to see a competitor in the market.

Played around a bit on Tomato but I have to say their Lifestyle (East Midlands) doesn't look too appealing. Have they pushed their prices up?

 

You're doing the most common mistakes on their website. There is 8 different Lifestyle tarrifs what's not obvious at all - some of them are pointless like the "solar" one you selected - if you don't select anything to customise your tarrif you get the same periods much cheaper. Selecting EV and battery gets you 6h at 5p rate but you swap 20:30:22:30 for 22:00-0:00 and I think rates are 1p more expensive in general? Another good one is as @masonic points out - selecting Pensioner - gets you long peak rates at 15p. Other don't make much sense.

Thanks. That was the pensioner option, but it did also have solar mixed in. I’ll play around with it. Octopus are currently paying 15p for exported electricity, which is one advantage they offer.

FreeBear

Chrysalis said:

So assuming the Octopus Mini stops working, how would I get live usage from the smart meter with Tomato to my phone?  Really dont want to fire up the IHD again.

Hildebrand Glow, but that is just another IHD (all be it with the ability to post the data elsewhere). If you really wanted the data showing on your phone, Hildebrand do an app for that.

Bendo

If they sorted their SMETS1 issues I'd consider lifestyle. With the price of gas it would work out cheaper to heat my thermal store via electric overnight and it would provide a good chunk of the heating with only a small top up with gas required later on.

But I still foresee that SMETS1 issue putting them out of business eventually. It can't be doing them much good for cash flow, given their prices look like they barely cover their costs, the additional  burden on customer service and inevitable ombudsman fees will probably crippled them.

Badboi

Has anyone looked at tomatopia? 5 years and you own the solar panels looks very tempting…

Scarum

How does Tomato source the energy?  Sorry if that has already been discussed but this is a long thread and I'm trying to catch up.

masonic

Bendo said:

If they sorted their SMETS1 issues I'd consider lifestyle. With the price of gas it would work out cheaper to heat my thermal store via electric overnight and it would provide a good chunk of the heating with only a small top up with gas required later on.

But I still foresee that SMETS1 issue putting them out of business eventually. It can't be doing them much good for cash flow, given their prices look like they barely cover their costs, the additional  burden on customer service and inevitable ombudsman fees will probably crippled them.

What makes you think SMETS1 would put them out of business? Because the compensation they'll need to pay out to SMETS1 customers that joined them originally? Because they're cutting off a large number of potential customers?

I'm not fully up to speed on the situation with SMETS1, but I remember years of controversy around them being continuing to be installed after SMETS2 meters were available.