Tomato tariff - Pensioner or 9-5 lifestyle

paul2louise

Looking a switching from the octopus tracker as current deal for fuel ends at end of month.  I know there is a lot of chat about tomato good and bad. I also know that the trend is all about energy shifting and charging but I want neither. Just cheapest option for normal usage with not rip off prices at peak times. I saw Tomato pensioner or 9-5 lifestyle  has cheaper prices. Just considering 

Largs

Ive seen the "chat" too.  Most of the bad seems to be from members here who are not customers of the supplier.  I am considering the pensioner variant.  Tracker/Octopus has been kind to me until this year so like you a bit undecided.

Newbie_John

There's no one answer for all.
What do you call normal usage? How many kWh a day do you use? What % of that is at night? Do you have Smart Meter 2?

paul2louise

Newbie_John said:

There's no one answer for all.
What do you call normal usage? How many kWh a day do you use? What % of that is at night? Do you have Smart Meter 2?

When I say normal I mean usage at peak times. Bit in morning before school and teatime 4-8. Been aware of octopus savings sessions and cutting back at the peak times. I have a smart meter. I use about 8-11kwh a day. Heating is gas central heating 

paul2louise

tlcgrantham said:

paul2louise said:

Newbie_John said:

There's no one answer for all.
What do you call normal usage? How many kWh a day do you use? What % of that is at night? Do you have Smart Meter 2?

When I say normal I mean usage at peak times. Bit in morning before school and teatime 4-8. Been aware of octopus savings sessions and cutting back at the peak times. I have a smart meter. I use about 8-11kwh a day. Heating is gas central heating 

On the 2options you gave with your usage the 9-5 option would be cheaper. Your rates are lower when you need them, you get 8.5 hrs at lower rates rather than only 7hrs on the pensioner option, and the standing charge is 2p lower. The cheap rate is 1pkwh lower and the full rate is also 1.58pkwh lower with the 9-5 option. 

       

I did look at both. I do a lot of jobs around 4 ish. We eat about 5 so the 9-5 was just a bit late for the slot. But I haven't ruled it out. Might look back at my usage and do a few sums 

Newbie_John

It really is simple, low usage, appears like 90% at peaks, Pensioner it is. Grab while it lasts .

tlcgrantham

paul2louise said:

tlcgrantham said:

paul2louise said:

Newbie_John said:

There's no one answer for all.
What do you call normal usage? How many kWh a day do you use? What % of that is at night? Do you have Smart Meter 2?

When I say normal I mean usage at peak times. Bit in morning before school and teatime 4-8. Been aware of octopus savings sessions and cutting back at the peak times. I have a smart meter. I use about 8-11kwh a day. Heating is gas central heating 

On the 2options you gave with your usage the 9-5 option would be cheaper. Your rates are lower when you need them, you get 8.5 hrs at lower rates rather than only 7hrs on the pensioner option, and the standing charge is 2p lower. The cheap rate is 1pkwh lower and the full rate is also 1.58pkwh lower with the 9-5 option. 

       

I did look at both. I do a lot of jobs around 4 ish. We eat about 5 so the 9-5 was just a bit late for the slot. But I haven't ruled it out. Might look back at my usage and do a few sums 

Sorry I’ve deleted my earlier post as it may well be wrong. The Tomato site seems to be slow to change options so it showed me 9-5 option when it was the pensioner option that was cheaper. 

Brand

I've signed up for the Lifestyle Pensioner with Storage heater tariff, but the IHD3 from previous supplier OVO (a two-rate tariff Economy 10) shows only the KWh running totals but no money nor change of tariff "countdown"

Looking at the smart meter itself  (pressing the orange botton, not the blue button) at particular "changoever times of day for OVO and Tomato (e..g. 8pm),  , it is clear that it is still working according the the two OVO rate timings.

This means surely that the two supposed Tomato rates data are not being sent to Tomato (or anyone), and that Tomato billing will pick up only the "Total" KWhr figure, so they have no half-hourly money record of your usage so I fear they will default to charge at the high rate 27p-ish,("Rate 1)

(Alternatively they might charge at some finger-in-the-air average between the two rates.)

The other big warning sign, of course, is that there is no Customer billing and correspondence portal that you usually find, so the two things are in completely separate databases. Even worse, nd the Contact Us form demands no account number, so presumably they are linking queries to numbered accounts the hard way, by surname, email address, and that would explain why responses to Contact Us queries are  non-existent.

I might be wrong, but as a new customer, that is how it looks to me.

Ildhund

Tomato appear to ignore meter readings and apparently haven't yet worked out how to retrieve them from a smart meter. I suppose this is because they work exclusively on Time of Use tariffs, with rates for each half-hour period of the day. All they need to do this are the half-hourly usage data, which they do know how to retrieve from the meter. The fact that your meter is recording consumption on two separate registers (peak and offpeak) is irrelevant to them. You won't ever be able to reconcile the totals of half-hourly usage with the difference between daily readings of the two registers. The total usage for a day should however tally closely with the total of the differences on the two registers for that day.

You say you have storage heaters. If these are switched on and off by the meter, they will be charging at the Economy 10 offpeak times. If these don't match the cheap times of your Tomato plan, you have some thinking and possibly some rewiring to do.

paul2louise

I started on the pensioner rate today. Let's see how it plays out. 

DeeQS

I moved my mother-in-law to the pensioner tariff. She has all electric panel radiators and is at home a lot of the day. It’s saved quite a bit from octopus tracker and lets her have the heating on during the morning and afternoon/evening when she is at home.
Bills have been accurate and on time for her..

My supply with Tomato on the other hand… no bill for 4 months..