Savings Without Changing Supplier

adrianlowes

Not sure if this has been mentioned on here but quite a number of people are paying over the odds for their electricity even if they have changed to the cheapest supplier.
This is how I came about discovering this. Recently my mother in law asked me to have a look to see if I could save her some money on her Electricity & Gas. First port of call of course was this site to check out the best company to switch through and used the link from this site to moneysupermarket to check what I could save her. The total saving was approx £240 per year, which she was pleased about. One thing I noticed however was she had an Economy 7 (dual rate) meter. For those who don't know about E7 it is basically a dual meter. One dial moves during the day and the other works on a night after 11pm. The rate you get charged after 11pm is very cheap circa 2p -3p per unit however if you have an E7 meter the supplier generally charges a higher rate during the day circa 12p - 14p rather than 8p -10p. These meters are great if you have the old style stowrage heaters on any type of electrical heating that you will have on during the night. However my mother-in-law has Gas central heating and uses very little during the night.

So basically she was paying over the odds for electricity during the day so she could have cheap electricity to run her bedside alarm clock on a night.

She is currently transfering from BG to NPower so once the transfer is done a quick call to NPower and they will send Meterplus out to change the meter for a standard single rate tarrif. This will drop her electricity bill by anouther 25% -30%.

She didn't even know she had an old E7 meter fitted. So I thought there may be loads of people who don't realise that when their stowrage heaters were taken out and they had Gas heating fitted they should change their electricity meter.

I hope this can help someone else save money also.
:beer:
Disclaimer:
I do actually work for the local electricity Distribution company so know what I am talking about with regards to this. Don't mistake the Distribution company for the supplier, The company I work for are nothing to do with supplier or any company that send you an electricity bill

mute_posting

Cheers Adrian

I've currently got a poll running on this forum asking what % of their usage people use off-peak if they have E7, E10 etc.

From reading the forums some claim that the break-even point on such tarrifs can be as low as 10% (but this obviosly varies region-by-region and depends upon how much more standard units are over a single rate tarrif and how may off-peak units you need to use to benefit from paying this extra)

Like you say, a lot of people may still be on E7 from when they relied on electricity for heating but may not have changed when they have had GFCH installed.

Here is the Poll...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=839209

Anyone who has or is interested in dual rate tarrifs, please feel free to vote and add comments

MP

adrianlowes

Generally if people are not using any kind of heating then it is cheaper not to have an E7 meter.
The easiest way to check is add up the total number of units used on your last bill then multiply by the standard rate advertised for your supplier if not on E7.

I wonder how much extra profit the suppliers are making by this simple lack of knowledge of the metering system.