Energy Supply

I had been a content customer of nPower for half of forever and would have probably have stayed with them for the other half.

BUT, they got taken over by E.on who promptly threw away all of my nPower account history!

So, I left. And moved to Octopus Energy, recommended by Which as the only supplier who passed all of their customer checks.

But, they have failed my account totally. It took two attempts to get the transfer done.

And now my account history with them already shows three random amounts of money (1 minus, 2 Plus) appearing from nowhere and basically the figures just make no sense. The balance now bears NO relation to any of my usage (I am hundreds of pounds in credit, but is not the point!)

It is now 72 hours since my first email to them about this and still no reply.

Any recommendations about where I go next?

I’ve been with EDF for many years now, moving from one fixed rate to the next as they came along. They also do my feed-in tariff for the solar panels and pay out within a few days of submitting a quarterly reading.

Any recommendations about where I go next?

Send your complaint by registered letter, keep proof of posting and mention the emails you have sent and the addresses sent to.

If you hear nothing within a reasonable length of time, then… https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/

I’ve been with EDF…..

Noted. thanks.

Send your complaint by registered letter….

I tend to complain by moving on.

So, maybe the two points could become related.

Another way to complain is via the Resolver site resolver.co.uk

I try stay with EDF to support nuclear, but of course loyalty is penalised these days and the renewals are crap, so often have to go away for a year and come back when they’ve dropped their tariffs to bring in new customers.

resolver.co.uk

Not heard of that. Will have a look.

I try stay with EDF to support nuclear, but of course loyalty is penalised these days and the renewals are crap, so often have to go away for a year and come back when they’ve dropped their tariffs to bring in new customers.

Energy, insurance, communications providers, you name it they penalise loyalty.

A colleague found his insurance provider doing a deal half the price he had, but couldn’t get a renewal at the discount “for new customers”
The lady on the phone helpfully suggested cancelling the policy (effective midnight) and taking out a new policy (effective midnight)

I tend to complain by moving on.

Didn’t you say you were a lot in credit? Complain, loudly. That’s abysmal service.

I try stay with EDF

I am with ErDF (what EDF is calling themselves these days) because there’s no other choice. There’s a wire coming into the property. ErDF supplies the excited electrons and Enedis supplies the excited meter and, well, that’s about it.

I am hundreds of pounds in credit

That’s not permitted over here. They used to allow small credits to accumulate, as we’d happily pay slightly overestimated bills in the summer to offset the winter bills (when the meter reader would come).
Then they sent the guy to read the meter twice a year because accumulating money was a no-no. They refunded us. However, it was an incomplete refund as the amount collected contains various taxes, and that is further taxed at something like 5% for the supply and 20% for wha’ts used (and, yes, the government taxes the tax, sweet deal huh?) and ErDF refunded what they took. The government? Kept the tax. Silly to expect anything else, really.

Now it’s a smart meter. The two-monthly bills are exactly for the exact milliwatt consumed.

to support nuclear

I have no feelings either way. I understand that there’s a lot of radioactive waste being shoved deep into tunnels in mountains (lucky France has a lot of mountains!) but I also understand that they produce more power for less overall pollution than dead-dinosaur power stations. It’s something that a technologically advanced country needs to accept, as all that shiny-shiny needs to be plugged into something. And within a couple of decades, several million electric cars. After all, if you’re going to say something stupid like “no more fuel cars by 2040” then you’d better be damned sure of two things: 1, that they aren’t going to crap out after doing about 100km and 2, that there’s the infrastructure to charge ’em all.

It seems right now the big development is on those bloody wind turbines that are sprouting up all over the place. They used to be… I think something like 500m from inhabited buildings, but that was increased to 1km because of noise pollution and various concerns about electromagnetism. However, conveniently, any site that already has planning permission but has not yet been built is able to go ahead within the 500m limit.

There are some new ones due to go up near here with one of them practically leaning on the side of a house. An old stone house that was up for sale and has since been bought. But, at the point it was on the market, it was “uninhabited” so was not counted as a property to avoid. If I understood the article on the news on the TV at work (last year, or so?), the guy pretty much said he expects to get his electricity for free or he’ll take a chainsaw to the thing.
You’ve probably guessed he’s a rural farmer. Think “the Worzels”. Or maybe Don Quixote. ;-)

Energy, insurance, communications providers, you name it they penalise loyalty.

Yeah, mom was good friends with a NatWest bank manager long ago. Mom applied for a loan for something, might have been the car… He pulled the application from the system and recommended a good loan at another bank. It seems that the mere act of applying would count against her credit score even when it was approved. He also explained something called the “fruits” system where people are evaluated by their assets and previous history, and said that it doesn’t really matter if you answer the application forms truthfully because the system assumes the client is lying and adjusts income and assets on some complicated scale according to age and sector of employment.
As you can imagine, he hated the way things were going and he much prefered when he, as a manager, would interview people and get a feel for them to decide whether or not to approve things. A computer program that actively penalises loyal customers is…….

so often have to go away for a year and come back when they’ve dropped their tariffs to bring in new customers

There are generally three tariffs over here for domestic use, with prices fixed by the state (this isn’t unusual, the government sets the prices of a lot of things – like “a generic baguette”).

There’s the “Blue” tariff. Straight electricity, where the price varies accounting to the kilowatt capacity.
That is to say, you can have… I think the lowest is 3kW and it runs in 3kW steps up to about 18kW or so. If you need more than 18kW, you’re probably a farmer so need a special farmer tariff.
Anyway, my rating is 9kW which means I can use as much or as little as I like up to 9kW. If I go over that, the meter will trip out until I reset it.
This is one of the primary reasons that people dislike the Linky smart meter. The old mechanical system was not sensitive to momentary start up surges. Like, when the water pump kicks in, it runs at about 1700VA but just for a tiny moment the current draw is closer to 2500VA in getting the motor going. The smart meter is sensitive to that, and would trip out if it took me over the 9kW limit.
Thankfully, I don’t tend to get that close. In the winter, say 1800W for the pump, 200W for the fridge, 150W for the assorted computers/lights/etc. 2000W for the water heater, 1000W for the room heater, and of course 2000W for the kettle or the oven.
All of that running at the same time (which would likely be artificial) would be 7150W, so there’s some leeway. 6kW would be too little, 9kW is just fine.
I say kettle or oven as it is running from an extension lead rated a little over 3kW. It’s one or the other, not both. There are only two regular sockets in the kitchen. On is for the fridge, the other is broken. There are, just to be useful, three three phase sockets. One fully wired 3+N+E and two that appear to be just 3+E.

The next tariff is called… Heures Creuses? Not sure of the spelling. It’s basically Economy7 and houses with it have a switch box. You get cheaper night time power at the expense of slightly costlier daytime power.

The final tariff, no idea what it is called, but it is freaky. During daytime hours, you pay a little less for your power. During the night, and I think some parts of summer when consumption is low, you pay pennies. But… there are something like 21 days in winter (dates chosen by EDF and can run continuously if they wish, and you get some sort of advance notification) you pay ridiculously over the top. This tends to be used by second home owners that just aren’t there in the winter. It is also quite liked by farmers. My neighbour has the agricultural version of this. I can tell when the over-price days are because his big old tractor-engine generator gets itself going (automatically; the engine is always pre-heated and the fail-over is something like five seconds, with local UPSs for the equipment to see through the gap).

It’s also, likely, the 21 coldest days of the year. ;-) Which is why I’m not interested in it. I don’t heat this place much, but I do like to turn the radiator on when it’s like -4 outside!

Didn’t you say you were a lot in credit? Complain, loudly. That’s abysmal service.

Ahh. It depends on how THEY view credit. My account shows a large credit. But, only because my energy usage does not use any of that money. The money and the usage are not related.

That’s not permitted over here

Which is probably why their computer systems are saying I should ask for a refund!

I spent a short time working as a non destructive tester for the Central Electricity Generating Board, and was able to make a first hand comparison with a spotless and ultra safety conscious Magnox station, and a coal fired station where I came out looking like I’d spent a week down the pit, having breathed in enough radio active soot to have set off the health physics alarms at the nuke. It’s so bad they can’t even have solid floors boiler house, if it wasn’t mesh on every level 200ft down to the basement it would collapse. I was recently the council liaison with a modern RWE gas plant, and while nowhere near as bad as the coal plant which was once there, it did belch yellow smoke on start up, due to the plant having to shutdown whenever renewables came online, crippling its efficiency, slashing its lifetime, and negating much of the renewables CO2 savings. But it was also one of the few blackstart stations which can restart the grid after a major outage, something wind and solar can’t do.

Ahh. It depends on how THEY view credit. My account shows a large credit.

I find this concept, as used by energy companies, confusing. I recently received one of their re-assessment notices, that said I hads a large credit, so they were reducing my payments a bit. The credit is more than a year’s usage, so why are they taking ANY payments?

I think it’s time to look into switching – again.

Hmm. I’ve just looked into the account details. The bill pointed out that I’ve reduced my gas usage and increased electricity compared to this time last year. Correct – that was deliberate, as I’ve turned down the gas central heating for the whole house, and use an air-source heat pump to heat the part of the house I use most. The number of KWH that changed is about equal.

Then I looked at the price of each – 2.73p / KWH for gas, 15.93p / KWH for electricity. I think I’ve switched my load in the wrong direction. Obviously using fossil fuel is 5 times cheaper than using electricity (however that’s generated). Isn’t something rather wrong here?

So if the efficiency of a gas-powered generator is better than 20% I could save money by generating my own electricity from gas? WTF?

So if the efficiency of a gas-powered generator is better than 20% I could save money by generating my own electricity from gas? WTF?

If you find out how to do that in a domestic situation, then I am interested.

So if the efficiency of a gas-powered generator is better than 20% I could save money by generating my own electricity from gas? WTF?

Yes. The key to why is in thermodynamics – not my favourite subject, but I’m glad that I managed to learn a little of it at uni.

Decades ago, my father pointed me at some numbers: the percentage of the primary fuel that arrives with the customer. Gas used to be about 96%; electricity used to be about 27%. I’m sure those figures must have changed somewhat since then, but considerations of themodynamics are against being able to make much improvement with electricity when generated from gas – which a lot of it is. The same sort of figures applied to electricity generated from coal, for the same reasons. Though it has to be said that the future of coal in electricity generation will end very soon, so the figure is of no real consequence.

If you get a thermodynamic efficiency significantly better than a third for a heat engine, you’re doing well.

Good luck making your own combined cycle gas station, even 500MW is considered too small to be viable these days. The lower you are down the efficiency pecking order, the sooner you have to shutdown when the sun comes out or the wind starts blowing. You might have a small advantage from doing your own combined heat and power system, as long as you don’t mind a gas turbine, steam turbine and a couple of generators warming up your living room – you might have to turn up the sound on your TV though.

I suppose my real point is that in a world where we are supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels, pricing electricity 5 times higher than gas is insane. Moving my heating from gas to electricity seems to be costing me £30 during cold six months.
Edit: thinking more about that, there is an assumption that 10KWH of electricity produces the same amount of room heating as 10KWH of gas. I have some doubts about that assumption. Maybe it’s just coincidence that my gas usage dropped by 170KWH in a 6-month period in 2020 compared with the same months in 2019, while electricity usage rose by 280KWH for the same period.
The fact that the second period was largely locked down might have some influence too.

10Kw of electricity delivered to your home produces 10KW heat ie if you have an electric radiator in a room it will release all it uses as heat to the room. The amount of heat from gas is dependant on the efficiency of the boiler. My old back boiler was about 65% efficient and my new one about 92% efficient at converting the gas into usable heat.

pricing electricity 5 times higher than gas is insane

Of all the energy in the gas being supplied to the power station, only something like a third will end up in people’s houses – that’s primarily because of the thermodynamic efficiency of the gas turbine. So, given that their gas has to be paid for too, you’re never going to get electricity prices less than three times gas prices, as long as we continue to generate electricity from gas. (Rough figures.)

Thinking more about that, there is an assumption that 10KWH of electricity produces the same amount of room heating as 10KWH of gas

Electric heaters are very close to 100% efficient. (A very small amount is lost in the cables between meter and heater. The heat is still in your house, so you might consider it as 100% efficiency, but the cables are not heating where you want the heat. Anyway, the loss is very small.)

Gas heaters are always going to be less than 100% efficient, because the flue gas that you chuck away is warmer than the room you’re heating, but you can get gas fires in the 80%+ region these days. Just avoid open-flue fires – their efficiencies are awful!

… and a modern gas condensing central heating boiler should have an efficiency more like 90%. I just looked up the Atag i24R, which claims 89.8%.

Electric heaters are very close to 100% efficient.

It’s hard to see where their energy goes other than to heat! However, an electric air-to-air heat pump can produce considerably more heat than a 100% efficient electric heater. They’re not more than 100% efficient, of course, but they can have a coefficient of performance of 3 or more – equivalent in terms of how much heat you get to having a 300% efficient heater. Hell, your fridge would produce more heat than the amount of electricity it used, if you kept putting bottles of water from your cold tap in it, and chucking the water down the drain when it was nearly freezing. Or if you kept making ice cubes and throwing them outside…

Strange – it seems to be the use of wood shipped over from North America (from which Forests?) by oil burning ships is Ok – where local coal isn’t.

Strange – it seems to be the use of wood shipped over from North America (from which Forests?) by oil burning ships is Ok – where local coal isn’t.

I’m pretty sure burning home-grown c.sativa¹ pressed briquettes would be more environmentally friendly.

¹ After extracting all the other useful bits for pharmaceutical use, and possibly after one time through the recycle chain as paper or cardboard (assuming the card wasn’t recycle 2)

I often wonder why California doesn’t use wood fired power stations. The trees burn anyway every year so you may as well use the wood – it could be part of a fire management scheme.

I gather from ones that have visited Yellowstone – that the heat given off from the Geysers is immense.

With the use of long range DC high voltage – that energy could be used.(as long as keeping cables underground)