Can anyone with direct experience of first:utility fuel suppliers comment on their level of satisfaction with it please? It has made a tempting offer to me to switch to it for gas and electricity. Which? consumers rated it at 54% here;
switch.which.co.uk/energy-suppliers/energy-companies-rated.html
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Hmn, no doubt accounts for the good offer. Many thanks for the lead.
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I'm with Ovo. They seem to get very poor reviews, but personally I have found their service second to none. I have no idea how they compare price wise...my DD is £38 pcm for Gas & electricity and I'm always in credit, supposedly earning 3% interest on my credit balance.
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I joined 1st Utility in October.
No problems with transfer. Seamless. Zero hassle.
Website works perfectly.
DD perfect.
Compared to Scottish Power they are very good.
Their service is - so far - as good as EDF..
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I have been with Extra Energy, leaving in September for a bulk buy deal with Eon.
First Energy are a load of utter WASTERS.
Not only did they fail to produce a final bill until I had filled in their web contact form at least three times, sent numerous emails direct and followed up with a snail mail letter, but after finally getting an eBill with a credit to me of £43, promising payment to my bank on, or around, the 27th. November; that payment has still not arrived.
Further web contacts, emails and two phone calls to the "help line" (return calls promised: not made) have been fruitless.
I have now sent a snail mail letter formally informing them that I will take my complaint to the Ombudsman Service (as advised by OFGEM'S website) unless the situation is resolved.
Only on pin of death or dismemberment should anyone fall for their blandishments of good energy prices.
Avoid, unless there are no other providers left!
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Been with First Utility for over a year. No dramas, only thing you have to remember is to read the meter when you get the e-mail.
Should you forget, or be away, they simply do an estimate and coprrect it next time you send your reading in.
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Just out of curiosity, how much of a hypothetical saving would you want to make before you changed supplier?
I moved from Southern Electric to Ovo in February 2014, and pay £48 pcm by DD which always leaves me in credit. A recent Uswitch comparison, using accurate consumption figures, tells me that by moving to GB Energy Supply, whom I've never heard of, can save me £100 pa. lots of other suppliers can also save me similar sums. In theory.
For the sake of saving a theoretical hundred quid, leaving a supplier who is easy to deal with, either email or phone, it simply isn't worth the hassle/risk.
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I used Ovo for three years. Call centre in Gloucestershire somewhere, minimum IVR jerking around.
They still didn't manage to send me a gas bill for over a year.
I've had problems with all the utility companies I have dealt with. If the common factor isn't me, I think it must be the systems and data processes involved in switching.
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Now, Extra- Blooming-Energy have sent me ANOTHER "first" utility bill - exactly the same as the one I received inn November! This one promises repayment of my £43 on, or around, the 9th. of January.
In their sanguinary dreams, I bet.
I have sent them an email being as sarcastic as I can be without cussing, asking that a human actually reads all my correspondence and uses a modicum of initiative in dealing with my complaint.
Utter one-off-the-wrist merchants!
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I would look to gain £200 from a switch. first:utility offered me £600 but on the basis of "If it looks to be too good to be true..." I stayed put.
Appalling account of nPower's failings in today's Telegraph.
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Actually ambo, I've been with npower for 4 years and pay by DD, but just for electricity as there isn't any gas up here (apart from Radon) :)
They are utterly useless customer service wise, but I'll stick wivvem until such times as they try to push a smart meter on me, and then I'll be orf.
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What's wrong with a smart meter? OVO arranged to fit one at my place but then I went abroad at short notice so cancelled the appointment. Doesn't it save submitting readings yourself, no more estimates. Am I missing something?
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There was a thread earlier on about them, yeah I think that was the long and short of it. It sends it all to your provider. Hopefully it will stop the cock up of meter readings, OVO cocked mine up when we moved in and took 10 months to sort out. I'd have one tomorrow if it cut down on that sort of faff.
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>>What's wrong with a smart meter?
I simply just do not want one. I don't actually use much electric during the course of the year. The little man (or woe man) comes along twice a year to read my meter, although I have registered with npower to submit on-line meter readings, but they are incompetent, except when it comes to extracting the spondulics from my bank account.
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I do not want a water meter, either!
As a band "A" council tax property owner, which was last valued in the late 1980s/early 1990s,, I'm better off on the old rateable value system!
I can also water the garden without cost considerations.
I do have smart meters, installed by Eon, but having switched utility suppliers 4 times in 5 years or so, they are out of use, even though I'm back with Eon!
(B.G. when we bought, then Eon, then EDF, then Extra Energy, now Eon agin).
I shop around every year for everything!
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>> I do not want a water meter, either!
>> As a band "A" council tax property owner, which was last valued in the late
>> 1980s/early 1990s,, I'm better off on the old rateable value system!
We used to live in an A band in east anglia water area and probably knocked about 50%+ off our water bill by switching to a meter, the rateable values were really high in EA water areas.
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That is of course a reasonable decision to take personally but of course taken overall it is only fair that electricity, gas,water etc are charge for on the basis of actual consumption.
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Sun 10 Jan 16 at 11:20
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>>As a band "A" council tax property owner, which was last valued in the late 1980s/early 1990s,, I'm better off on the old rateable value system!
I can also water the garden without cost considerations
Y'all could always have a water meter installed, just to see if there were any savings to be made, and if it doesn't work out, yoos can tell 'em where to stick it.
Also, when you say you have smart meters, do you mean a 'proper' smart meter which automatically sends the readings to the energy Co's, or the things they used to give away so you can see whether a 60w bulb uses more energy than an electric cooker?
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Anglian Water will allow you to try a meter for two years and return to assessed charges if it doesn't suit.
I suspect Roger is in Severn Trent's territory (though some parts of North Notts and North Lincs are a mash up with Anglian) and don't know if they do same thing.
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...I am "sat on" an offer from ST at the moment, and yes, it's a two year "trial" period.
Given my council tax band, and the fact that we are now "empty nesters", I'm seriously considering it (though I suspect the installation in my case may not be straightforward).
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I think you might find that you are "sitting on" it old chap...
;-)
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....you are, of course, grammatically correct; hence my use of "inverted commas" old bean.
;-)
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Phew, I thought perhaps for one minute there that you were a northerner or something...
;-))
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....and would a northerner (are there really any northerners for you?) have slipped a semi-colon into the subsequent answer?
I don't, however, mind you commenting on grammar, (even if it may seem nit-picking) because I agree that if it had been non-deliberate usage, it could have been quite embarrassing for a lesser person.
Haven't you got a bike to ride/dog to walk/mirror to repair/blind to rehang?
;-)
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Going out on the bikes presently actually. Sunny here for what seems to be the first time in a long while.
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(though I suspect the installation in my case may not be straightforward).
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My meter installation was done actually inside the house - it means that any leakage from the supply pipe are at the utility company expense :)
That reminds me i should have another look for the stopcock tho!
At my fathers property (70s newbuild) for years the stopcocks and meters were reversed with the adjacent prperty
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>> (though I suspect the installation in my case may not be straightforward).
>> >>
>>
>> My meter installation was done actually inside the house - it means that any leakage
>> from the supply pipe are at the utility company expense :)
Mine was as well, there was a shared water supply with four houses.
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...indeed, and installation within the house would (from past experience) be a bit of an issue.
(there is only just enough of the supply pipe exposed to get a (fairly dodgy) connection on to).
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>> Y'all could always have a water meter installed, just to see if there were any
>> savings to be made, and if it doesn't work out, yoos can tell 'em where
>> to stick it.
Good point I think ours was a two year window to change back.
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>>and probably knocked about 50%+ off our water bill
>> Y'all could always have a water meter installed, just to see if there were any savings to be made, and if it doesn't work out, yoos can tell 'em where to stick it.
Our local water company would often contact us to offer a water meter, but when I asked if this could be removed if we didn't get along with it, they said no. However some years later they changed their policy and would remove the meters up to one year after installation, so we went along with it.
This immediately reduced our bills by 50% - almost to the penny.
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We were obliged, by Southern Water, to have a water meter installed last spring. It's under the pavement and read by a system in vans driving by. The first reading was so high that I went and took a reading myself which was substantially different. The drive-by system is supposed to be foolproof, but I now know that it can be misled by water lying around the meter, which was the case with ours. Now that the payments have settled down, we're paying £22 per month rather than £58 before the change. Obviously we're happy, but I make sure to do a reading myself from time to time.
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I don't have a bill to hand to check, (we have a meter), but I seem to recall last time noticing that the money you pay for the actual water used is about ten pence, and the other forty million is made up of standing charge, run off charge, run on charge, drainage charge, daily charge, vat charge, chairmans's BMW charge, looks like it might be cloudy charge and we think we can get away with it charge.
So sharing your bath with a brick or whatever it is is likely to save 5p per year.
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>> So sharing your bath with a brick or whatever it is is likely to save
>> 5p per year.
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A good reason to over indulge and get fat then. Displacement is everything.
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...Shirley, the water would then have to be deeper (and therefore more of it) to cover everything!
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Are you saying 6 of one and half a dozen of the other then?
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>> We were obliged, by Southern Water, to have a water meter installed last spring.
Genuine 'open' question:
How were you charged before and in what sense were you 'obliged' to change.
I have a professional interest in the answer. One of my colleagues was told by a client that a water supply company (not Anglian* or any other 'biggy') had asserted that the law required people to change over.
* The spell checker wanted to change that to Anglican water!!
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...there are some (limited) circumstances under which you can be compelled to install a water meter, or the supplier can install a meter and subsequently charge you via a metered bill.
They're simply set out in the OFWAT document, here:
tinyurl.com/mustaphameter
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I'm in Anglian water area in a band C property. Water meters were fitted a few years ago and we had the option to remain being charged on rateable value or meter.
I elected to stay on rateable value, on the basis I could read the meter and decide for myself if it were cheaper, it is, probably due to SWMBOs use of the washing machine and dishwasher. There's only two of us in the house!
It would seem the price of metered water has increased more than rateable value costs, as many neighbours now regret switching.
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>> They're simply set out in the OFWAT document, here:
>>
>> tinyurl.com/mustaphameter
Thanks for that prompt response - very useful indeed. Already passed on to my colleagues and managers.
Thinking about it I knew about thingslike swimming pools and auto watering systems. The 'water stress' one is new to me though and applies in parts of Anglian's patch and that of the local suppliers such as Affinity and Essex/Suffolk.
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Yes, sorry not to reply before. I had to go and do something else.
We were charged on rateable value before. I was mistaken - the meter was installed about 2 years ago. The reasons given were:
"We're carrying out large scale metering because the region in which we live is already under serious water stress and further population growth will continue to increase demand. Climate change is likely to mean drier summers and more frequent droughts so that means we will need to stretch our resources further."
We weren't obliged to change over immediately to metered billing, but we did because it was obvious we were on to a winner.
Last edited by: John Boy on Sun 10 Jan 16 at 17:27
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Looking at Severn Trent's T & Cs, it seems I should have a meter as I use a sprinkler to water our grass.
Nope.
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....you have grass and a property in Council Tax Band "A"?!!! 8-)
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Look on Rightmove for house prices in Worksop!
Why else are we here? (We do have good road links to both the A1 and the M1, though.)
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...oh, I know Worksop!
I spent the afternoon of the Friday before Christmas mooching around.
Not a personal comment at all but a serious point; anyone who believes that the #longtermeconomicplan is working would do well to spend a dull, wet Friday afternoon wandering round the likes of Worksop.
...and no, that isn't a comment on the Town or the people (or at least, some of the latter).
:-(
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Council tax band A is up to £40k at 01/04/1991
Given I paid £60k on almost exactly that date for a 3 bed detached in what even then was relatively prosperous Northampton £40k would have bought a palace in an ex mining town.
A revaluation is of course desperately called for but no government has the balls to order one. Winners ans losers will probably be roughly equal in number but one will bank their winnigs and smile while the rest get the publicity.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sun 10 Jan 16 at 21:33
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>>£40k would have bought a palace in an ex mining town.
>>
...not really a palace (and in '91 it wasn't an ex-mining town, though some had gone it was noticeably more prosperous than now).
What is true however is that more than 50% of the properties in Bassetlaw are currently in band "A".
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>> ...not really a palace (and in '91 it wasn't an ex-mining town, though some had
>> gone it was noticeably more prosperous than now).
>>
>> What is true however is that more than 50% of the properties in Bassetlaw are
>> currently in band "A".
Yo get my drift though?
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...yeah, it's just that I'm sat sitting in a band "F" house in an ex-mining village.
Comfortable, but not a palace ;-)
Last edited by: tyrednemotional on Sun 10 Jan 16 at 22:00
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Worksop town centre is a dire place, filled with the largest number of obese people and the most mobility scooters I have seen in a population centre.
There is a huge unemployment problem, as a result of the lack of ndustry, although there are some modest industrial estates. Some areas do have a drug problem and there are a fair number of daytime drinkers about.
Despite this, crime is no worse than in many other ex Industrial small towns.
The town, being close to good road links, and major cities such Sheffield, has plenty of pretty good commuter type modern housing developments.
It's not a bad place to live on the periphery of town and houses ARE cheap.
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"Despite this, crime is no worse than in many other ex Industrial small towns."
I'm never too sure about crime statistics for a variety of reasons but a couple of years ago when I was looking at the low crime figure for a small town with a questionable reputation, it dawned on me that maybe the crims simply went elsewhere to nick their stuff. ;-)
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A good outcome. I had agreed to switch to first:utility but decided to opt back into E.ON after what I read here, not because E.ON had sent me an email trying to get me to think again. I sent letters twice on another topic (inaccessibility of my electricity meter). Someone rang up on each occasion to say they would be answering by email but they didn't. I sent a return email saying there had been no trouble with emails when I had proposed switching. Two days later they offered me a new tariff, which hadn't been there before, giving me a saving of £400.
I accepted and am filing this under "Benign Jiggery-pokery".
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Thems appear to be bucking their ideas up a tad, possibly down to all the negative publicity they receive, plus all the alternative Co's in the energy market these days.
I'm wiv npower!!! and have been for five years now - I switch the light on and it works 99% of the time.
What more could one ask for out here in the middle of nowhere, man.
They even gave me 20 notes recently for a minor cockup on their behalf - without me even asking forrit!
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first:utility - Dog
