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

WBCPB

masonic said:

Since I had usage on two registers, Octopus was only billing using one of these (ignoring the second), and TE only has one input box showing "Tot", I did not want to use the website and potentially have the two suppliers interpret a single reading differently.

What was your result with the 2 registers, Octopus have only used the "Rate 01 Acc. Imp" register for my consumption on Agile, shall i just give Tomato this same register reading?

masonic

WBCPB said:

masonic said:

Since I had usage on two registers, Octopus was only billing using one of these (ignoring the second), and TE only has one input box showing "Tot", I did not want to use the website and potentially have the two suppliers interpret a single reading differently.

What was your result with the 2 registers, Octopus have only used the "Rate 01 Acc. Imp" register for my consumption on Agile, shall i just give Tomato this same register reading?

I declined to input a single reading into MyWatts and instead emailed them details of both registers. I don't know the outcome yet. I flagged this during my 'welcome' call with TE a week later, and they noted it on my account. Octopus have yet to issue my final bill. The clock is ticking down for £40 automatic compensation. I believe @Chrysalis contacted Octopus and got them to agree to using the directly provided final reading if the validated reading comes back different. I may push them to do the same if needed.

Bendo

If they had any money, surely they would have paid whoever did the DCC integration to fix it by now so they could bill and take on SMETS1 meters. It cannot be that difficult to rectify.

Personally don't see them lasting another 6 months, but regardless of that if they were taking on SMETS 1 I'd jump anyway as the savings are worth the ultimately bit of hassle.

masonic

Bendo said:

If they had any money, surely they would have paid whoever did the DCC integration to fix it by now so they could bill and take on SMETS1 meters. It cannot be that difficult to rectify.

Personally don't see them lasting another 6 months, but regardless of that if they were taking on SMETS 1 I'd jump anyway as the savings are worth the ultimately bit of hassle.

They are using one of their own companies (Senapt) for the CRM and DCC adapter, all newly built, so it would seem to be their problem to fix. Agree that given there are many third party services that can pull this data it seems that with appropriate resources their devs should have cracked this before now. So goodness only knows why it still rumbles on given it is such an existential threat.

lohr500

In my opinion, their lack of ability to fix the early 30 minute time shift error on MyWatts and the billing was symptomatic of a rookie development team who were out of their depth.

Despite several of us explaining the fact that the timestamp on the half hourly 30 minute kWh usage data recorded by the meter refers to the 30 minutes usage preceding the timestamp, TE continued to interpret this incorrectly.
They assumed the usage was for the 30 minutes FOLLOWING the timestamp.

I seem to recall it took them nearly TWO months to correct that error. My September and October bills were both incorrect as a result, as were the bills for many other customers. The root cause was not complex, but still it took a long time to rectify.

Rightly or wrongly, my conclusion from this was that they were (and possibly still are) out of their depth when it comes to managing complex TOU tariffs.  

QrizB

lohr500 said:

... they were (and possibly still are) out of their depth when it comes to managing complex TOU tariffs.  

Or any other sort of celebratory event in a fermenting house.

lohr500

QrizB said:

lohr500 said:

... they were (and possibly still are) out of their depth when it comes to managing complex TOU tariffs.  

Or any other sort of celebratory event in a fermenting house.

Indeed. I suspect if you led them to the tap, showed them how to open it and provided them with the tankards, they would still get it wrong   

tlcgrantham

Bendo said:

If they had any money, surely they would have paid whoever did the DCC integration to fix it by now so they could bill and take on SMETS1 meters. It cannot be that difficult to rectify.

Personally don't see them lasting another 6 months, but regardless of that if they were taking on SMETS 1 I'd jump anyway as the savings are worth the ultimately bit of hassle.

They do take on Smets 1 but only offer their Prime tariff at 21pkwh with an SC of 50p daily but fixed for a year with no exit fees.

wrf12345

It would be interesting to know how much off-the-shelf software would cost them rather than developing their own, hard to imagine that it would represent a huge chunk of the bill but this is the whacky, weird world of energy retailers with tiers/layers of ***'s at the trough .

masonic

wrf12345 said:

It would be interesting to know how much off-the-shelf software would cost them rather than developing their own, hard to imagine that it would represent a huge chunk of the bill but this is the whacky, weird world of energy retailers with tiers/layers of ***'s at the trough .

You are coming at it from the assumption that they are trying to be an energy supplier. This is a side-effect. They are developing a service platform to white label and market to energy suppliers. Those who sign up to the energy supplier they bought are beta testers for that product, and there is lots of work to do before any energy supplier not owned by them is going to touch the product. Their investors are not going to give them tens of millions to burn selling energy at a loss to customers so that they can implement some off-the-shelf software as it would give them no return their investment.

Go have a read of https://www.senapt.co.uk/ to see what they are really trying to build.

...and this is what they are up against: https://kraken.tech/