Retired Government technical officer keeping fit with dog walking and finding retirement so full tha...
Retired Government technical officer keeping fit with dog walking and finding retirement so full that I wonder how I had time to work.
Member since:28.11.2005
Reviews:23
USwitch is one of the best known comparison and switching sites for home utilities, particularly gas and electricity.
In July 2007 I tested USwitch along with 7 other comparison sites to find whether EDF was still my cheapest supplier for dual fuel. We have a large house using 35000kWh gas and 3500kWh electricity per annum and are on EDF Dual fuel online tariff V4, Our annual bill for this is about £960 per annum.
Using USwitch was reasonably straightforward, but I could not find my actual EDF tariff so put in the nearest thing I could find.
USwitch came up with results very quickly, but gave my annual spend as around £1200. From this it deduced that I could save about £124 by switching to Utilita at a new annual cost of £1075.
If you have been following this you will have realised by now that Utilita, according to USwitch is actually about £115 MORE than my real EDF bills based on actual consumption.
Of the 8 other sites I tried, only 3 included my real EDF tariff and came up with a present annual cost of about £960 (give or take a little). These 3 all told me EDF was at least £124 cheaper than the next best (Utilita). The 3 sites that gave my CORRECT EDF tariff were
(a) SimplySwitch (b) UKPower (c) energychoices
- all easily found by 'googling'.
Besides USwitch, the other 5 that got it WRONG (for my EDF tariff) were
The most surprising was that Which? should produce an inaccurate result (for my tariff).
The moral of this is not to trust just one comparison and switching site - check several and look at the results carefully to see if they all use the same data or tariffs in their results.
From my experience I do not trust USWitch on its own - it could have cost me at least £124 per year if I had switched on its advice alone.
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Comments about this review »
Stg27 18.07.2007 10:42
Anyone thinking of switching utility companies should read the article on Moneysavingexpert.com that covers this subject.
Greta review and should help people know to do their research in several places.
Advantages: Simple-to-use, reliable site, which could save you quite a bit of money! Disadvantages: You might need to pay your current supplier quite a bit of money too!
SueMagee 30.05.2003 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of uSwitch.com
Jul 17th, 2007
very helpful by (35%):
helpful by (59%):
somewhat helpful by (6%):
