Electric tarrifs

As we all know it's often cheaper to switch suppliers now and then for our gas and electric.

I used to do this religeously every 4 months but have become a bit slack over the last year only changing twice but since Ebico put their prices up they are not the cheapest now and if you need to save money then it is necessary to look around and change as the needs arise.

I've said before I don't trust the comparison sites which stems from the time i was a door knocker salesman for British gas and Eon. I always look at the companies own website to find the details of the lowest tarrif and often you may find that the power companies offer a two rate tarrif which can be hard to work out for your home.

My tip is to always take daily meter readings and then you will know what you are using. It's no good blaming the power companies for taking to small a D/D when you are using the power.

A person on another computing board i visit wrote out this formular for me to work out the cost of two tarrif electric bills.

=IF(SUM(A2:L2)<901,SUM(A2:L2)*0.1826,(900*0.1826)+((SUM(A2:L2)-900)*0.0796))

It can be cut and pasted into the top line of an excell spreadsheet in column M2. The first row is labeled jan, feb, march, april etc, one month in each cell A1 through to L1.
In ROW " column A you write your monthly electric useage figures. For me it was 230kwh. so I'd put 230 in cell A2 240 in Cell B2 260 in cell C2 all the way along for each month.

In the formula above you will see the numbers 901 and 900. These represent the first tarrif. For many companies it is a higher price for the first 900 units of a year then cheaper for all the rest. British Gas has 500 units at a high price then the rest at a lower price. Some use 182 units which IS FOR A QUARTER so should be multilpied by 4 idf usig the above calc. If your power company uses a figure then this 901 / 900 will need to be altered to suit your tarrif. The last bit you need to alter is the 0.1826 and 0.0796 in the above formula. These figures represent the actual cost in pence of your tarrif. The 0.1826 is the higher tarrif ( for the first 900 / 728/ 500 units etc) and the 0.0796 is the lower figure for the remaining units you use in a year.

If any of you good followers have any problems then leave a comment or better still email me and I'll do a spreadsheet for you if you give me your company and figures etc.

I'll be experimenting with this formula over the next few weeks to see if it works for gas. It should as the gas is also in KWH but there needs to be a conversion process first to get it to KWH if you have an old meter like me,lol.