Cheaper Electricity & Gas
On this page:How to save nearly £400 a year in utility bills
Compare and switch suppliers on Energy Helpline
, which on its site says that at least 10% of customers who used it to switch their electricity and gas providers between 1 July 2010 and 4 October 2011 saved £389 a year or more.
The average saving was 16%. During the last period of energy price rises, from June to September 2011, prices increased by 14.4% on average across the big 6 energy providers.
The site is fast, easy to use; the service is free, independent and impartial.
Energy Helpline
has been certified by the regulatory body Consumer Focus as it demonstrated compliance with all nine requirements of the Confidence Code, and now displays the Confidence Code logo on its site.
Energy Helpline
helps UK customers not only to save money on their gas & electricity, but also on green energy suppliers and business electricity and gas through its price comparison service.
Once you've found the right service for you, you can sign up online by filling in a few simple details and Energy Helpline does the rest of the admin for you.
Or use Energy Linx , another free and impartial online service. It is an electricity and gas search engine which lets you compare the prices of all suppliers and find the best deal for your home.
Energy Linx site says that customers using their service saved on average £130. The maximum saving was over £2,260.
When you arrive on the Energylinx site, you can choose to compare both gas and electricity prices, only electricity prices, or only gas prices.
Energylinx is also fully accredited to the regulatory body Consumer Focus Confidence Code.
British Gas , also, offers several ways to save money.
One is Online Energy , British Gas cheapest variable tariff, with a guaranteed 4% discount against its Standard tariff rates until January 2014. You manage your account online.
Another is Energy Smart : British Gas sends you a free electricity monitor with which you can see exactly how much energy your appliances are using, in real time, so that you can manage your usage and be more in control of it, reducing energy consumption where it's not needed. You can even track your energy usage online and, also online, you can set energy usage targets to help reduce your bills every month.
A Very British Worry
A spectre is haunting Britain: that of fuel poverty. But there is a way to reduce our energy bills.
British people are more concerned about how to pay their energy and utility bills than any other financial matter. Surveys by organizations and consumers programs like the BBC's Watchdog have revealed that we are more worried about the huge increase in our energy bills than any other effect of the credit crunch.
It's not surprising because, whereas we can cut on luxury and unnecessary expenditures and we can save money on food by buying cheaper ingredients and meals, electricity and gas bills are harder to adjust to our pockets.
According to the BBC's consumer programme Watchdog, you can save even a few hundred pounds a year if you switch your supplier and start being energy smart.
Switching to a new electricity and gas supplier is easy. But what can be confusing is to compare different prices and tariffs in order to save money. There are several price comparison sites, but it may be difficult even to choose among them.
The watchdog Consumer Focus, the industry regulatory body presiding over the energy sector and campaigning for a fair deal for consumers (which has replaced the previous consumer champion Energywatch), has checked the many price comparison websites, so you can follow its recommendations as a good guidance on which sites meet the best criteria to give you a quote on the latest deals and tariffs.
Both Energy Helpline
and Energy Linx , that we describe above, meet these criteria and have been awarded with Consumer Focus accreditation of the Confidence Code, whose logo they display on their sites.
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