Gas and electricity prices are on the up, leading many consumers to look for an alternative supplier. Yet it seems there are just as many sites vying to give you that information as there are energy companies clamouring for an ever-increasing share of your cash. If you want to be self-sufficient, saving money is a must.
Here we’ve picked five to help you make the choice. All of them made the same recommendations once we’d filled in their questionnaire about our gas and electricity usage, indicating that they work from a very similar, or perhaps identical, database.
uSwitch is probably the best known of all the utility comparison sites. It was one of the first, and over the years has expended beyond gas and electric to compare loans, insurance, mortgages and digital TV.
The questionnaire for judging the best gas and electric suppliers is couched in simple terms (electricity consumption questions include examples, like ‘family home’, ‘working couple’ and ‘second home’ to cut through the jargon) and you have the option of saying you have no details handy when it asks for your current consumption. Switching advice can then be made on the basis of price, recommendations from users, or a supplier’s green credentials.
It remains an excellent resource, but there is now so much competition in this field, that uSwitch needs no longer be your first and only choice.
Simply Switch, like uSwitch, goes beyond simple utilities to include heating insurance, mortgages and business savings, among other things. Our current energy supplier wasn’t listed among its choices, despite featuring on every other comparison service here. Should this happen to you, it recommends a series of broadly similar competitors: find your supplier in the list and substitute it for the competitor. Sadly there was no equivalent for our supplier, either, at which point we were advised to call the company’s freefone number.
Assuming your supplier is included, we really liked the way this site went about estimating your consumption based on the size of your house and how many people live there. The other sites do something very similar, but it’s more obvious here and great for first timers.
Recommendations can be made on the basis of price, green credentials, Internet administration tools or capped prices, and filtered to include all products, or only those for which you can apply.
Money Supermarket has by far the simplest questionnaire of the lot. You can take either the detailed exam, where you’ll enter the same kind of information as you would for any other site here, or opt for the simple survey, where you do nothing more than choose your supplier. You can optionally change your consumption details, but leaving them set to the defaults gave the same results in our test as running through the detailed option. Very impressive.
Once you’ve switched your utilities, you can go on to compare travel, phones and broadband, among other things. We also like the gas and electricity price rise calendar, which shows who has just changed their prices, and whether they went up or down. Check this before following anyone’s recommendations, as opting for a supplier who has yet to revise their prices could see you switching just before they get a whole lot more expensive.
Money Supermarket is very open about who pays it commission for touting their products, and it was good to see a link to this information right beside the recommended tariffs.
Energy Helpline sounds like a government body, but it’s actually just another independent comparison site. Like the others featured here, it can estimate your consumption if you don’t have your bills to hand, and it lets you do this in one of two ways: the simple way, with only two questions (the size of your home for electric and gas), or the detailed way in which you tell it how often you cook, what kind of house you have and how you use your energy. It uses similar plain-English terms to those of uSwitch, and supplements them with an option for running a ‘very warm house’.
Recommendations can be made on service ratings, green credentials, Internet features or – one we particularly like – extended call centre working hours, so you can have your queries sorted out whenever they crop up, not just when it’s convenient for your supplier.
Energy Choices is a little less flexible than the other suppliers profiled here, as it expects you to know how much gas and electricity you consume, by entering either the total cost of your bills, or the actual kWh used on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis.
That point aside, it was a quick and easy single-screen process to get to our recommendation, and we liked the way that although we asked for dual fuel, where gas and electric are quoted from the same supplier, it suggested very clearly we might also like to take a look at an alternative option of buying from two separate recommended suppliers, which would save us money over the course of the year.
Inclusion in this list is no indication of endorsement. Other utility comparison services are available.
Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving, saving
Related posts:
