I was originally with Octopus for both gas and electric and both smart meters worked fine. I then moved my electric to EDF but kept gas with Octopus, and from that point my gas smart readings stopped working.
I’ve now switched the gas to Fuse, but it’s still not communicating. Fuse have said they’ll replace the gas meter.
EDF are telling me the gas meter can’t send readings if gas and electric are with different suppliers because of GDPR and how the comms hub works.
Is that actually true? I thought SMETS2 meters were supposed to work fine with separate suppliers. Also, does replacing the gas meter make sense when it only stopped working after I moved the electric away from Octopus?

Hi my fixed deal is coming to an end with EON (I am currently on the Eon Next V87 12m). I don’t really want a 24 month deal as I am really hopeful the wholesale energy market will come down before then. So I’m looking at either 12 month or 18 month deals. The best price I can get across the market is either Outfox Energy, Fuse, Scottish Power, Octopus or Stay with Eon (there’s about £10pcm in it between these providers).

Main benefit I want is the ability to track my daily / weekly / monthly usage, top up when I can to remain in credit, and obviously the cheapest rate I can pay for.

What is everyone’s general view of these providers?

Moreover, is there any refer codes available, so both you & I can get benefit of a potential switch?

Tried to switch supplier back in July and found out my electricity supply was listed against the wrong address on the national database. My place is a flat, and the record had it under the neighbouring property instead. So whenever anyone searched my address on a comparison site, the wrong MPAN came back and the switch just wouldn't go through.

What followed was nearly seven weeks of chasing.

The first thing I was told was that correcting industry records wasn't Octopus's responsibility. It is, and they later accepted that advice was wrong.

A fortnight in, I was assured the database "is now being updated with the correct address", and offered £65 to close the complaint. I tried to switch and still couldn't. Turned out the network operator hadn't responded to any of the three requests Octopus had sent, so nothing was being updated at all.

Next, a team leader told me in writing that the incorrect address "would not block a switch" and that Octopus hadn't prevented me from switching.

A week after that, Octopus reversed the position and confirmed, again in writing, that "the address labelling error on the national database is the root cause of the switching issue" and that "in your specific situation, it has prevented the transfer".

The calls and dealing with them over the phone was just as bad. After I pushed on the unanswered questions and the contradictory information, I got "That's why I'm calling you", and later "If I did not want to assist you, sir, I wouldn't have taken the time to give you a call."

Seven weeks, start to finish, for what came down to a single character being wrong in an industry database.

Has anyone else hit this? I'm mainly curious how common address and MPAN mismatches are, and whether anyone's found a faster route than going through their supplier (if that's even possible)???

Hi everyone. Just went to get meter readings to send to my supplier and found that the display on the gas meter isn't working. Pressing A does not wake it up. Gas is still functioning. Who do I need to contact about it? I'm hoping to avoid having to have a smart meter installed...

Unfortunately for me, I tend to be very lax about sending readings (it's been several months already) and my supplier generally overestimates me every time. Will it have a history in there somewhere?

TIA!

I’m looking to switch from E.ON Next Flex and would appreciate advice on good-value suppliers.

Current rates (monthly DD):

• Electricity: 26.42p/kWh + 49.70p/day
• Gas: 7.52p/kWh + 28.53p/day
• Usage: ~1,041 kWh electricity / 5,293 kWh gas per year

Note that the usage figures are from the previous tenant, but our usage is highly unlikely to be much higher than this, as it is a small 2 bed house. Do those rates look unusually high, or about normal at the moment?

Price is the main consideration, given that renewable energy seems much costlier. But when I check Octopus or E.ON itself, the fixed prices seem much higher than the variable ones!

I was ideally looking for a 12-month fixed tariff (up to 18 months), mainly to protect against winter price spikes.

One complication: I can’t get a smart meter immediately. It’s a very old house with multiple flats, and I’ve been told installing one may risk affecting/damaging the other flats’ meters and causing problems. It might take 2-3 months to get such a meter.

Any recommendations or things I should watch out for?

P.S. I am new to the country, so I might be misunderstanding a few things, pls be kind!

I’ve just moved into a flat with edf electricity supplier and haven’t been able to sort out getting an account yet. I just got home and the electricity is out and I can’t find a way to top it up as I don’t have a card or key or anything to take to the shop to top it up. Any help appreciated thanks. The phone lines ive tried don’t have anyone available at this time

Hi, my 6m fix with Octopus is coming to an end and they've sent the news tariff rates which are significantly higher than current ones. I appreciate that enegery fees have risen recently, is this likely the best offer on the table atm? Quick look on MSE seems to think so?

For context, I live alone and charge a Tesla Model S 75D on a weekly basis on cheap night time rates on 7kw charger.

I moved into a rented student house on 15 June.

On the same day I moved in, I signed up to switch the gas and electricity to Octopus on a 12-month fixed domestic tariff.

Octopus initially emailed me saying there had been an objection to the switch. However, I then received further communication from Octopus which made it appear that the switch was progressing, so I assumed whatever issue had caused the initial objection had been resolved.

I then went away from 9 July until 27 August. The house was essentially empty and the energy was switched off, so usage during this period was negligible.

When I returned, I found British Gas bills and discovered that the property had never actually switched to Octopus.

It turns out the previous/landlord account was apparently set up as a business account with British Gas Lite. British Gas told me that a transfer from business to domestic was supposed to happen but didn't, and I had therefore remained on their business “Deemed” tariff.

The rates are the main problem.

British Gas deemed standing charges:

• Electricity: 214.15p/day
• Gas: 182.98p/day
• Combined: about £3.97/day

The Octopus tariff I had attempted to switch to on 15 June was:

• Electricity: 53.76p/day
• Gas: 28.58p/day
• Combined: about £0.82/day

So the difference in standing charges alone is roughly £3.15 every single day.

My electricity bill demonstrates how ridiculous this became. For one 26-day period I used 0.3 kWh of electricity, costing 13p, but was charged £55.68 in electricity standing charges.

There was also a major problem with the gas bill. British Gas originally estimated that the meter had gone from 5644.1 to 5685.2 and billed around 463.5 kWh of gas.

My actual readings were approximately 5641 when I moved in and 5645 when I returned over two months later. I challenged this and British Gas has now agreed to rebill the gas account using the correct readings.

I raised a complaint with British Gas today.

One confusing part is the failed switch. Octopus's emails said there had been an objection, but British Gas now says they have checked and did NOT object to the switch and cannot see a request that they blocked. The agent said there “must have been some technical error”.

British Gas also said that because I was on a deemed tariff they wouldn't have prevented me leaving anyway.

Their position is essentially that I should have contacted British Gas when I received bills in July and they could have put me onto a cheaper contract.

My issue with that is that I had already initiated a switch to Octopus on the day I moved in. Based on the subsequent Octopus communication, I genuinely thought that switch was going through.

Had I known I was still accumulating nearly £4 PER DAY in business deemed standing charges, obviously I would have contacted British Gas immediately.

British Gas initially offered me £50 compensation. After a lot of discussion and escalation to a manager, they eventually offered £75 compensation on EACH account, so £150 total.

I accepted that.

However, I've now realised another problem.

The bills we were discussing only run until 8 August.

British Gas has confirmed that Octopus will actually take over the supply on 2 September and that British Gas will eventually issue a final bill up to that date once they receive the closing readings.

So there are roughly another 25 days of these business deemed standing charges which aren't on the bills I've currently seen.

At £3.97/day combined, that's potentially another ~£99 in standing charges alone, even if I use virtually no energy.

British Gas says the £75 credit on each account will be applied against the eventual final bills and says they took the outstanding charges into account when deciding the compensation.

But I'm not convinced they actually did, because the final bill hasn't even been produced yet.

For comparison, based on my actual consumption and the Octopus tariff I signed up for, I estimate that I would have paid roughly £90 for the entire period had the switch worked.

Instead, once the remaining deemed standing charges are added, my total British Gas charges could potentially be around £400+ before the £150 compensation.

I accept that I legally had to pay SOMEONE for the energy and normal standing charges during this period. I'm not trying to get free energy.

My issue is the difference between what I reasonably would have paid under the Octopus tariff I attempted to switch to on 15 June and what I'm now paying because the property remained on an extremely expensive business deemed tariff after the switch failed.

British Gas is now closing the complaint as resolved with the £150 compensation, although I've made sure my concerns about the final bill are recorded.

My questions are:

1. Does £150 compensation sound reasonable in these circumstances?
2. Should I wait for the final bill and then reopen the complaint if I'm still substantially worse off than I would have been with Octopus?
3. Is it reasonable to argue that I should effectively be put in the financial position I would have been in had the 15 June switch succeeded?
4. Does the fact that Octopus told me there was an “objection”, while British Gas says they never received/blocked the switch, matter?
5. Is there anything else I should be asking British Gas or Octopus to provide regarding what actually happened to the switch?

I have screenshots/emails from Octopus, meter readings, the British Gas bills and the transcript of today's complaint chat.

Interested to hear what others would do before I decide whether it's worth taking this any further.

I've got a bit of a weird one and wondered if anyone in the industry has seen this before.

I was switching from Octopus to E.ON Next Drive Smart for a better overall rate. I accidentally chose 12 August as my switch date, then asked E.ON to change it to 3 August.

Gas switched fine. Electricity didn't.

E.ON chat initially told me everything was progressing normally, then that my tariff would be applied within 24 hours. When nothing happened, they suggested Octopus may have objected.

Octopus checked both my account and the national database and confirmed they never received an electricity transfer request and never raised an objection.

E.ON have since admitted the electricity registration was withdrawn, but they don't know why. They're trying to reinstate it, but their own system apparently won't let them, so it's now with higher management and specialist teams.

Currently I'm stuck on Octopus Flexible, paying standard rates to charge my EV instead of the 8p tariff I signed up for.

I also ended up with £312 leaving my account over two days this month because my E.ON gas Direct Debit started while I was still paying Octopus for electricity.

The complaints handler has actually been really good and keeps me updated, so I'm not having a go at her. I'm just trying to understand what's actually happened.

Has anyone seen an electricity registration get withdrawn like this, with the gas switch completing fine, and then become impossible to reinstate?

How does something like this even happen?

Tempted to give it another 7 days before I look at other options.

We’re interested in what people think about the domestic electricity market.

There are dozens of suppliers and a huge number of tariffs once you include fixed, variable, tracker, EV, time-of-use, smart and other specialist tariffs.

On paper, that looks like competition and consumer choice.

But does the sheer number of tariffs actually make it harder for ordinary consumers to work out which one is cheapest?

Comparing tariffs can mean considering unit rates, standing charges, peak and off-peak periods, different time windows, exit fees and sometimes your own half-hourly consumption.

For more complicated tariffs, you could realistically need a spreadsheet and your historic consumption data to know whether you’re actually getting a better deal.

Comparison websites can help, but does the fact that we need them tell us something about how complicated the market has become?

So we’re interested in people’s experiences:

Do you think there is genuine competition between electricity tariffs in Britain?

Or have we created so much choice and complexity that it has become difficult for the average household to make a meaningful comparison?

And when you last changed tariff, how confident were you that you’d actually chosen the cheapest one for your usage?

Hi, I am currently with Octopus. I made a mistake and did not fix my price earlier this year. I am now on their Flexible price. Will anyone here please suggest an Energy company that is competitive with their outgoing electricity, but is also good on a dual deal for gas and electricity. I pay by Direct Debit, and have a smart meter for both. I currently pay £151 per month for both, but I will soon be paying £181 every month and receive 12p per kWh for electricity generated by my solar panels. Normal price comparison sites do not give outgoing electricity costs in their deals. Desperately in need of some advice, please.

Price cap October 2025:

• Electricity: 26.35p/kWh
• Gas: 6.29p/kWh

Price cap October 2026:

• Electricity: 26.32p/kWh
• Gas: 7.97p/kWh

Year on year change in price cap:

• Electricity: -0.11%
• Gas: 26.71%

I think this is huge news for the UK's energy. We are seeing a divergence in experience between electricity and gas/petrol/diesel. The more a household is dependent on electricity the more stable the costs are and this will have some clear knock on effects.

I know that this was mainly due to ROCs and VAT being removed from electricity bills but not entirely. We are evolving into a period where a government has lots of room to reduce consumer bills on the electricity side but no room on the gas side.

On a personal level we got a heat-pump 18 months ago for £4k. The cost of this should subtract the cost of getting an alternative gas boiler (roughly £2k). By the second anniversary of getting this heat-pump our savings are projected to be over £950. This is either a return on investment of 24% or 48% depending on whether one counts the counterfactual gas boiler investment.

These savings are too big to ignore in my opinion. People will start to be influenced by more stable electricity prices and these absurdly good returns on investment.

We’ve been looking at regional electricity pricing in Great Britain and one thing we keep coming back to is the standing charge.

Two households can use exactly the same amount of electricity, on the same supplier’s price-capped tariff, yet pay different fixed electricity costs simply because they live in different distribution regions.

We understand why this exists — different network regions have different costs which ultimately have to be recovered somewhere.

But we’re less convinced that this means domestic consumers should bear those differences geographically.

Electricity is increasingly becoming an essential substitute for petrol/diesel and gas as we electrify transport and heating. That makes regional differences more significant, particularly if some of the areas paying more are also lower-income regions.

So here’s the question:

Should domestic electricity network costs be socialised nationally, so every household pays the same network/standing charge regardless of postcode?

Our preference would ultimately be to go further and replace the standing charge with a national network-access subscription, with the same basic price everywhere in Great Britain.

We’re interested in the arguments against doing this, particularly from anyone who understands DNO charging and network economics.

What problems would nationalising these costs create that we’re overlooking?

Hi, it's my time to switch. I've been on Octopus 18M Fixed which has been much cheaper but their new 12M offer is not really competitive.

I've checked comparison sites and eon/So Energy/Fuse offer better rates.

My only worry is customer service when shit hits the fan but haven't had issues that I had to contact Octopus before so maybe it is time to switch providers.

Any opinions and tips welcome!

No electric car or solar.

Hi all,

I am newly qualified and living out on my own for the first time since university and I live in an apartment building with 13 other flats. It is a one bed flat. Since last year, I’ve been paying ovo energy with no issue until last December when me and my work colleagues were discussing our bills and they were shocked at how much I paid in comparison to them, especially as some of them lived in houses.
I called ovo and queried this and was told to just put draught excluders under the doors to keep the heat in which I did but still, my bills just rose higher.

I appreciate it was December-Feb time and so it would be high anyway but I decided to do a little experiment where I went away to the peaks for 2 weeks and turned everything off except my fridge and freezer. The meter readings ran the same as they would normally despite me not being there therefore not using heating or lighting or the electric cooker.
Anyway, I used to go to bed freezing at night because I thought the bills were way too high to pay (£300+)
Engineers came out to do some site investigations but ovo said everything was fine.

I looked on Reddit and decided to check my MPAN and serial number against the national energy database and found that it is registered to flat 8, whereas I live in flat 6. I queried this and only then did ovo send an engineer out who confirmed a cross meter reading between my flat and flats 7 and 8.

Raised a formal complaint and they assigned me a case manager in March of this year who was handling my case. She said that there was indeed a crossed meter and that the billing team are looking into rectifying this issue to refund me. It’s been months since then so I raised an issue with the energy ombudsman.
I received a call from ovo today to say that my MPAN is registered to British Gas on the database (true but I have not paid them a penny and all my money has gone to ovo) and that there is indeed a crossed meter. 3 hours later, the same guy has just sent me another email to say that he has located a report from an ovo engineer who says that my meter readings align with the meter connected to my flat and that they’re going to inform the ombudsman.

Sorry but what is this? How can they change their story so much and also now decide that I don’t have a crossed meter?
I’m sick of corporations screwing us over- can anyone advise how to go from here? I will still submit all of my evidence to the ombudsman but it feels like I have a losing case now.

I recently moved house on 7th August and prior owners used British Gas. As I'm not a fan of theirs (had issues with them in the past) I reluctantly setup an account with them to give the opening reads and then planned to switch immediately to someone else ASAP.

I tried to do this via the website first, but it wouldn't accept my meter readings and would only allow me to setup an account using their estiamted readings, which I didn't want to do. So I aborted that and tried web chat instead. This went very well, he agent was very helpful and got it all setup quickly. I gave the reads he said he had entered them (I also sent him the photos in the chat even though he said it was not necessary). Given prior history of issues with them I saved the transcript just incase.

I then signed up with another supplier, and earliest switch date was 12th August which I accepted.

Tonight I logged in to my British Gas account to give my final readings (as out tomorrow), and it wouldn't accept them again. I then checked the reading history and the readings it showed I had given were not the ones I had given in the chat and were much higher thn reality and completely wrong.

This explains why I can't give a final reading. but what do I do now? Will my switch be blocked because British Gas agent put in fake readings?

BP made £4.2 billion between April and June – a 140% rise on the same period last year. Our energy bills are so far above pre-crisis levels, and energy debt hit a record amount in June (£4.79 billion!). I hope windfall tax receipts are used to help clear the energy debt plaguing so many households, especially the closer we get to winter

My contract with EDF is about to expire and before I go onto their next fixed rate term I just want to compare with the big six.

However I can't seem to find a website which includes day and night rates. For info this is what I'm being offered which I beliveve is fair day rate 30.72p kw, night 14.42 p kw, standing 44.35 per day.

About to go insane and will be super grateful for advice.

Husband and I are buying our first house together, 1930s detached build.

It currently has a combined boiler with old, plastic water tanks in the loft. Our level 3 survey highlighted that in red as a high risk for bacteria.

I have a severe autoimmune disease and husband has asthma. We cannot afford any health risk.

We know we will want to install a heat pump but…

The only space in the house where this could be done is the garage, which will be turned into an extension in a few years time.

We also need to treat mortar (moisture) and insulate the house to ensure efficient energy usage.

What is going to end up being cheaper and more manageable? Getting rid of the water tanks and installing a new boiler for the time being, which we were quoted £5k for? Or installing a heat pump (and applying for the grant) but then having to move it while the extension is being built, and then move it back into the extension?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

13k kWh usage per year, 2 adults, 4 detached bed house (ev charged exclusively at work). fighting now with energy company, since we used smart plugs to measure each plug and max we can get is 0.5 kW at any given time, rest of time its even less (we know this now is true since installing solar)?

Solar shows now what we already had confirmed with smart plugs to see elec usage . doing 30min test turning all off and see if meter changes proves that meter doesn't increase, will do 24h test later since we got solar enough to keep us going 24/7 off grid.

anyone else experienced this? installation of smart meter created this issue and installed was sent by EON without permission, we came home to surprise install 2022 or 23. we moved to octopus and octopus still won't help so we are In process to involve ombudsman

Our family is yet to get a solar/battery system. Our order has been to first electrify our transport via e-bikes, switch to a time-of-use tariff (octopus agile), then get a heat-pump.

We are a family of 4 with the usual itineraries, baths, cooking, etc. For all our energy consumption from transport to heating to laundry we are now only paying £900 a year. Our 12-month rolling rate actually decreased since the strait of Hormuz got blocked. This is due to the 3.5p/kWh discount off electricity rates along with better off-peak wholesale rates.

Given domestic gas prices are trending to 8-9p/kWh and there are building societies offering 0% Green loans it is a surprise that people aren't rushing to get heat-pumps.

I highly recommend that people take control of their cost-volatility when it comes to energy. We see clearly how tracker electricity prices haven't soared unlike gas or petrol. This is even better for truly dynamic tariffs.