On Sat, 28 Jan 2017 17:10:04 +0000, Clive George wrote:

If you're doing holiday lets, include electricity/gas in the price -
it's not worth the hassle of doing anything else. People won't notice a
fiver on the cost of the let, they will notice the arse-ache of having
to feed a meter, coins or digital.

Agreed. Most people aren't used to meter feeding so the first they'll
really notice is when the power/gas goes off. Even if you have it in
small words and big letters on the first page of the Letting
Agreement. Then you'll get the panic phone call at 0200 and what are
you going to do about it...

From the POV of renting the property, prepay would annoy me as those
tariffs are invariably higher than standard, let alone the "deals"
you can get(*). Not being used to prepayent I'd be fretting about
feeding the meters rather than enjoying the holiday.

(*) If you can switch to a bog standard credit meter I think you'd
make significant saving over prepayment. We have nPower's standard DD
tariff, 16p/unit no standing charge. Just looked at nPower's Pre Pay
Fixed March '18 30p/day standing charge and 14p/unit, 110 quid
standing charge buys and awful lot of lecky that is only 2p/unit more
(15 units/day v the average households 9 units/day). That's against a
standard tariff a "deal" would almost ceratinly be better. And you
get rid of the hassle of topping up. How far is that drive to the
shops? The real cost of running a car is around 40p/mile (fuel, tax,
insurance, maintenace, depreciation)..

You do need to know what your useage is and a spreadsheet makes the
number crunching pain free. The only real way to know which tariff is
best is to work out what a years bill would be for each one.

--
Cheers
Dave.