On Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:30:55 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

snip

Isn't life a bit short to have to arrange your day around what power costs
at any particular time? ;-)

There were times when some of us delayed making a casual phone call
till after 6pm, just because it was cheaper and 30 years ago I tried
to charge my EV overnight (on E7), so I think this has been going on
for a while.

The issue for me is that saving money by regularly switching tariffs
(becoming a 'rate tart') could be fine *if* the systems in place at
the time can deal with such easily and the returns are worthy of any
input effort involved.

It's also the law of diminishing returns, looking at the savings you
can make by (regularly potentially) switching compared with any other
savings you could make in your life that could be much greater. Like,
it's possible I could save £150 off my energy bill which is the same I
pay for my secure storage per month? Or I could dump my land line and
go mobile only (BB over cable), saving £240 pa?

Or I could move to a more energy efficient house or make this one
smaller by putting internal insulation on all the external walls ...
etc etc.

Or as you say, I just get on with my life, keeping costs down on the
things that are easy to do, like doing our own vehicle maintenance.
;-)

That said, *if* there was a system that automatically switched energy
suppliers and was *guaranteed* not to cost us a single penny ever and
didn't involve any extra work on my part (like having to read the
meters every month) and there was *no* risk of any administrative
errors ... I can't see why *everyone* wouldn't be on it?

But is there no chance that if that was available, it would put many
suppliers (or 'middle men') out of business ( going back to the old
single supplier days) as it's obvious that the vast majority would end
up on whoever was the cheapest, and the others ending up with no
customers?

Like Black Monday, a supplier would only have to reduce their prices
to something that caused most to auto-switch and then when all the
others have gone to the wall, put their prices back up. I'm not sure I
want to be party to such nonsense?

All that aside, I'd still like to monitor and log our energy (and
water) usage, just for the S&G's of it all.

Cheers, T i m