Sky High Energy projections/DDI increase requests

[hayfield]

24 minutes ago, Bernard Lamb said:

There are times when you do make me laugh.

You say no politics please and then you give the thread a provacative title.

You could have taken a more neutral tone by calling it something along the lines of current levels of payment requests.

My supplier is Eon and they have been very open with their billing options and have actually gone beyond the legal requirements and even apologised for taking a couple of weeks to sort things out. 

Bernard

 

 

 

Bernard

 

I am glad I made you smile, nothing political about saying sky high prices. Plain truth and hopefully prices will drop in the not too distant future. 

 

Eon may well be offering good rates, but are offering lousy rates to those of us who export surplus energy we generate, everyone's circumstances differ 

[hayfield]

57 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

I'm surprised the amount of credit many people have. A while ago any credit over £100 owed to the customer was automatically refunded. I read somewhere that Ofgem allowed the energy companies to disregard this and build up credit. I must search for this info.

 

I believe the energy companies are using us all as a free bank (for them).

 

It will be mayhem next year.

 

Brit15

 

 

 

 

A couple of years ago I would have agreed with you but times change, given the benefits I have received from Octopus I would rather them have some of my money than mine or any other bank, for me the benefit is I pay a level payment each month, my main reason for moving to Octopus is the way they look after their customers, especially those with solar panels

 

51 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

Right now I'm £684.17 in front although I expect this to fall quickly once I allow the heating to be turned on...

 

Spot on, I much rather rely on the credit I have built up over the summer to supplement my winter bills, rather than find extra funds from income

[hayfield]

I have just had this (stock?) reply from Octopus.

 

"Balance Forecast is an industry-first experiment in sharing more information about energy directly with the people using it. We're continually improving it but please be aware:
It may sometimes fail
It doesn't work in all circumstances

It's based on your current prices and your estimated energy use, taking into account historical readings (including previous tenants), 5 years of weather in your local area, and local weather forecasts for the next 25 days.

We've created Balance Forecast, a new account tool to shed light on why we set Direct Debit payments the way we do. Read on to understand how it works".

 

Now I do have the greatest respect for Octopus as they do seem customer focused and have what I believe an industry leading product for those of us with solar panels. I think the kindest thing I can say is I am one of those where it does not work and its failed a bit.

 

Certainly their assumptions for October bore no resemblance to my usage this or last year (out by 150%), how the next 25 days forecast works for 12 months is beyond me as the forecast is not updated, and I cant think the weather this October was that much different than any of the past 5 years. I think the marketing department have worked overtime with this glowing statement. Its also quite a bit more than the revised annual estimate on the monthly bill

 

When I was self employed it was drilled into me to listen to replies and if I feel the reply is incorrect to question it. What worries me is there are some who will take these claims at face value and perhaps will get very concerned. We are not even in winter (as far as bills are concerned) but many are claiming they cannot afford their current bills. No wonder people are getting worried if other companies are doing similar forecasts.  Simply if you think the bill is wrong check it

 

 

[Kris]

On 11/11/2022 at 17:42, BR traction instructor said:

…LPG around £90 per 47 kilo bottle. As I said at the start, everyone will be in a different situation but there are options to control energy bills.

 

BeRTIe

I've just paid a fraction under £130 for 2 x 47kg bottles. Might be worth you asking some of your other local suppliers how much they will charge if you are paying £90 for a bottle. 

[JJGraphics]

Some companies are definitely taking the Michael with DDs or perhaps they are just trying to bank a load of our money as someone suggested earlier in this thread.

A supplier who had best remain nameless tried to almost TREBLE our elderly, disabled, lady neighbour's DD. She is careful about what she uses and was almost £900 in credit when I heard about the problem from her. She had spoken to them and got a "we know best" type of brush-off. She was very upset by the ridiculous amount of money being demanded.

It took me two phone calls to get the DD reduced to something more realistic. The first person I spoke to obviously had no idea what she was talking about and after I asked to speak to a manager put the phone down on me. The second person launched into the same sort of spiel but, when I changed my attitude to being very firm, did put me through to someone more senior. After a bit of faffing about the "manager" did concede that the proposed DD was too high and agreed what I felt was a more acceptable amount.

The moral of this story is: don't be intimidated by suppliers into paying far too much but be careful to pay enough.

John

[hayfield]

15 hours ago, JJGraphics said:

Some companies are definitely taking the Michael with DDs or perhaps they are just trying to bank a load of our money as someone suggested earlier in this thread.

A supplier who had best remain nameless tried to almost TREBLE our elderly, disabled, lady neighbour's DD. She is careful about what she uses and was almost £900 in credit when I heard about the problem from her. She had spoken to them and got a "we know best" type of brush-off. She was very upset by the ridiculous amount of money being demanded.

It took me two phone calls to get the DD reduced to something more realistic. The first person I spoke to obviously had no idea what she was talking about and after I asked to speak to a manager put the phone down on me. The second person launched into the same sort of spiel but, when I changed my attitude to being very firm, did put me through to someone more senior. After a bit of faffing about the "manager" did concede that the proposed DD was too high and agreed what I felt was a more acceptable amount.

The moral of this story is: don't be intimidated by suppliers into paying far too much but be careful to pay enough.

John

 

John

 

I was trying to allude to this in a couple of replies. The problem is call centre operatives have to stick to a set script, they are totally lost when you either question their reply or ask a question which is not on the list. This time last year my daughter and son in law were £500 in credit with their supplier, who was insisting they doubled their DDI payments, then when they moved companies held on to their money for nearly a year ( The ombudsman had to get involved twice finally ordering an additional compensation payment)

 

This may offend some but I have found recently so called well educated people are actually seemed to be programmed into believing without question what they have been told, and seemed to either flummoxed and or annoyed when you question their reply An example is the reply from Octopus "taking into account historical readings" At face value its what you would expect, but look into it deeper

 

Last October Total cost of energy £73.75

Estimated use this year £220

Actual spend this year £84.30

 

We were away for 10 days if you increase our spend by 50% (though it would have been less had we been at home) it would have been £126.45. The difference just does not add up.

I am now nearly 2/3rds through the next accounting period and have spent £106 to date. The projection assumes I will spend £291 in November. As it happens last years bill was £115.83

 

By all means these companies should make conservative assumptions, the good thing with Octopus is that these numbers are a suggestion, not a request. Plus they say they may not be accurate to everybody.

 

I must add that in every other dealing I have had with them they have excelled. But as you say others seem not that good

 

Edit

 

The BBC just reported that the weather is milder than average at the moment, so perhaps this go a little in explaining the difference

Edited November 14, 2022 by hayfield

[hayfield]

 

Less good news over the past 2 days in that energy support will be withdrawn for most users after March. I guess the good news is that our reliance on gas starts to fall dramatically in the following months and hopefully oil/gas rates will fall

[JJGraphics]

7 minutes ago, hayfield said:

This may offend some but I have found recently so called well educated people are actually seemed to be programmed into believing without question what they have been told, and seemed to either flummoxed and or annoyed when you question their reply.

 

Absolutely agree with you.

The ability to think for themselves seems to have been programmed out of a lot of people these days and some call-centre staff (but thankfully not all) have not been trained in even the most basic aspects of customer service and in some cases have no idea of basic good manners.

There was no doubt about the bluntly rude attitude of the first "customer service" person I spoke to, but the second one got the message that I was not going to be fobbed-off.

Let's hope that the weather over the Winter does not turn too cold so that we can conserve energy and keep the bills down.

John

[hayfield]

John

 

Whilst I am going off topic, this is the fault of our education system, which in my opinion is spending too much time teaching pupils how to pass exams rather than teaching the subject and having a testing regime which tests their breadth of knowledge and understanding of the subject.

 

After school I was taught to question opinions/statements/processes. A simple analogy is when asked why are we doing this, this way, the answer was, because we always have done it this way.

 

 

[Reorte]

29 minutes ago, hayfield said:

John

 

Whilst I am going off topic, this is the fault of our education system, which in my opinion is spending too much time teaching pupils how to pass exams rather than teaching the subject and having a testing regime which tests their breadth of knowledge and understanding of the subject.

 

After school I was taught to question opinions/statements/processes. A simple analogy is when asked why are we doing this, this way, the answer was, because we always have done it this way.

"We've always done it this way" is a reason I prefer to "because we've never done it this way before." Change for the sake of change, "it's new so we must do it this way!" bothers me more than (small c) conservatism. Not that I'd want to take that to the furthest extreme of course, although for whatever reason looking at things in terms of black and white extremes, 100%, 0% or nothing (anything else is "inconsistent" and you're contradicting yourself dontchaknow seems to be rather common.

Edited November 14, 2022 by Reorte

[hayfield]

3 hours ago, Reorte said:

"We've always done it this way" is a reason I prefer to "because we've never done it this way before." Change for the sake of change, "it's new so we must do it this way!" bothers me more than (small c) conservatism. Not that I'd want to take that to the furthest extreme of course, although for whatever reason looking at things in terms of black and white extremes, 100%, 0% or nothing (anything else is "inconsistent" and you're contradicting yourself dontchaknow seems to be rather common.

 

You are correct that doing something different just for the sake of doing something different is equally as bad as continuing doing something just because we always do it that way, I simply said question both scenarios. 

 

The business I worked for suffered from what I believe were people making changes simply to justify their existence. This was often borne out several weeks later when we reverted back to the previous method.

 

[hayfield]

Octopus yesterday night tried their first experiment in encouraging users to reduce their electricity output between 5 & 6pm. As it happened we were going to have a Chinese meal so were not using the oven over that time period anyway. Scheme apparently funded by the National Grid

 

If its a reduction in our daily usage it will hardly notice, otherwise most evening between 5 & 6 is our highest usage hour, results due in a couple of days

 

The Octopus dashboard states 288,000 customers signed up/took part, quite a large number

[BR traction instructor]

Getting an air fryer is a good energy saving move…we use ours for most meals now.

 

BeRTIe

[hayfield]

I have heard this said and apparently the health benefits may be greater than the cost benefits. But like all things it depends on what you cook and the quantity you are cooking.

 

To me it seems a lot of rubbish is said about the cost of cooking. Cooking our Sunday lunch over a 2.5 hour period we used 2.2kwh, approximately .4 kwh is our non cooking average over that period during daylight hours, the cost of gas was minimal as most of the veg was roasted, cost .35p x 1.8 = 63p. A quick look at the cost of meals other nights is well below 1kwh especially when non cooking average is deducted (our supplier shows a break down of our use half hourly)

 

I totally agree investing in investing in ways of healthy eating (not just appliances), which can also lead to reduced costs. To eat healthily neither needs expensive appliances or foodstuffs, just a bit of simple research. 

[Michael Hodgson]

3 hours ago, hayfield said:

I have heard this said and apparently the health benefits may be greater than the cost benefits. But like all things it depends on what you cook and the quantity you are cooking.

I quite agree.  I often use a slow cooker and don't know anything about air fryers, but I doubt I could make a chilli or a curry in one?  Otherwise I mostly either heat stuff in a microwave or grill my food rather than frying it for health reasons, my speciality being Saucisses a l'alerte d'incendie.  So I rarely use a frying pan, and I won't have a chip pan in the house because they set the kitchen on firei too easily.

[Metr0Land]

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I quite agree.  I often use a slow cooker and don't know anything about air fryers, but I doubt I could make a chilli or a curry in one?

 

[57xx]

On 11/11/2022 at 11:17, BR traction instructor said:

The Dragon oil radiators that we use are very efficient and combine with our low kWh price to keep our thermally efficient home heated. If gas prices drop then we have the less environmentally friendly option to burn more and reduce our use of the oil radiators but there is also the consideration of how our supplier generates the electricity in the first place.

 

How a supplier claims to produce it's electricity or how "green" they claim your tariff is, does not actually represent what enters your home as far as how it has been generated.

[John Isherwood]

40 minutes ago, 57xx said:

 

How a supplier claims to produce it's electricity or how "green" they claim your tariff is, does not actually represent what enters your home as far as how it has been generated.

 

It beggars belief that these claims get past the advertising regulators!

 

Unless you have direct and exclusive hard wiring between you and your (allegedly) 'Green' supplier, you get the same semi-polluting energy as everyone else.

 

Anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is delusional!

 

CJI.

[BR traction instructor]

1 hour ago, 57xx said:

 

How a supplier claims to produce it's electricity or how "green" they claim your tariff is, does not actually represent what enters your home as far as how it has been generated.

 

…my inference related to us burning gas in our boiler for warmth compared with an electricity provider burning gas to generate the electricity used by the oil radiators…much of a muchness really.

 

BeRTIe

[57xx]

2 minutes ago, BR traction instructor said:

 

…my inference related to us burning gas in our boiler for warmth compared with an electricity provider burning gas to generate the electricity used by the oil radiators…much of a muchness really.

 

BeRTIe

 

Ah, ok, I clearly misunderstood you, so my comment does not apply to you.

 

I have seen people who believe the green-washing from their providers so wanted to point it out.

[Guest]

46 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

It beggars belief that these claims get past the advertising regulators!

 

Unless you have direct and exclusive hard wiring between you and your (allegedly) 'Green' supplier, you get the same semi-polluting energy as everyone else.

 

Anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is delusional!

 

You worry about the elecrtricity mixing in the wires?

It doesn't matter. It's not paint.

[John Isherwood]

24 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

You worry about the elecrtricity mixing in the wires?

It doesn't matter. It's not paint.

 

Worry, not me!

 

I just feel sorry for those f**ls who pay extra for 'Green' power.

 

CJI.

[J. S. Bach]

Hmmm, my electricity is sort of blueish-white; at least it is when I get the wires crossed! 🙀

[hayfield]

12 hours ago, 57xx said:

 

How a supplier claims to produce it's electricity or how "green" they claim your tariff is, does not actually represent what enters your home as far as how it has been generated.

 

My main driver is not green energy, but reducing my energy bill, what I can say about Octopus is their values of being a green company extends to their attitude to their customers, especially those of us who have solar panels. I have certainly reaped the benefits from a company with a social conscience 

 

On the other hand from memory I think I heard EDF claim on TV about being one of the biggest suppliers of renewable energy in the UK, but according to Solar Energy UK pay the lowest rate (a tenth of Octopus's rate) to solar panel owners. Please note I have deliberated stated renewable rather than green 

[hayfield]

10 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

Worry, not me!

 

I just feel sorry for those f**ls who pay extra for 'Green' power.

 

CJI.

 

We should be paying less for green power (and may well do so soon) as the cost of producing energy is not linked to the vaguries of the oil price

 

Secondly my net price of using a green producer may well be much cheaper than using a non green energy supplier as I am getting a very high rate for exporting, may not be high at this time of the year but very high in the summer !!!