On 17/12/2017 20:56, alan_m wrote:
On 17/12/2017 19:59, newshound wrote:

*Slightly* surprised not to find Ovo not offering something else
reasonably competitive to what I guess is their "standard variable
rate" tariff which kicked in a couple of weeks ago when my previous
deal expired.


I get the impression that a company will offer a good deal in order to
gain 100,000s of new customers and then not have another competitive
deal until they have lost X% of those new customers.Â* They can make more
money from customer inertia - customers not realising they have been
moved to higher tariff for 3 months or more.

The other trick that they often play is after, say, 6 months suggest you
should move to another of their saver tariffs without paying a penalty.
They will suggest that these tariffs save you money compared to the
tariff you are on but in reality they are more expensive. They use the
industry standard way of calculating your YEARLY spend on the two
tariffs - one of which will include 6 months of energy at the higher
standard tariff . This may result in a customer staying with the
supplier for a number of years because each switch results in a new 12
month contract with penalties if changing to another supplier.

In my last two moves the company I was with was one of the cheapest at
the time but at the end of the year any followup fixed price contracts
with them tended to be the more expensive in the marketplace.

By the way, if you pay by DD check your bank statements during the
switch period.Â* When I switched away from British Gas a good number of
years ago they erroneously applied the early end of contract penalties.
The penalty amounts NEVER appeared on any bill but were taken as two
separate DD payments (dual fuel) straight from my bank account.



Thanks for the warning, will look out for that!