The cost of living... what can we do?

They are waffling on about energy prices again, is it just me or are they making it all more complicated than it needs to be.
Personally I'd just like a price per unit quoted instead of all this average usage stuff if they had done that from the start we might have a better idea of what the hell is going on.

 

We're not supposed to be able to work things out though, are we? Energy unit prices, phone and internet tariffs, price-per-unit/quantity on the shelves. It all amounts to the same thing....

 

Was much better when we BTUs.
I seem to remember at one time you just paid X amount per cubic foot.

 

It can be confusing but when you do the math it's easy to work out. I am with BG, so are my parents and the business. We opted to pay less per kWh but pay a standing charge on a 60 month contract, which we agreed in 2020. We are on 04246p per kWh and 27p a day standing charge, so glad we went with a 60 month contract as previously we always went with 36 month contracts.
The only difference between the three accounts, mine is estimated where my parents and the business pay for what they use, smart meters. My meter was last read on the 29th September and has been estimated since, my DD from Sept to Dec have been £80 per month and since January it has been £50. I phoned BG on Friday with my current meter reading for my home, since the 29th September to the 10th March my gas bill works out at just under £390.

 

I think those that quote such generalised figures think we're all thick. Perhaps they recognise that British education has slipped a lot over the decades.

They usually quote for the average 3 bedroom house, which is utterly ridiculous for many reasons.

Firstly, which average? When people say average without qualifying it, they are usually refering to the mean average. The trouble with 'mean' is that it's quite meaningless.

In the world of data, we often talk about Pareto's 80/20 rule. Basically, when analysing a particular thing, often 80% of the total is generated by 20% of the thing it correlates to. For example, in sales, often 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the customer base. It's certainly not consistently an 80/20 split, but it's often somewhere near. In energy usage terms, that means a larger portion of the energy use will be attributed to a smaller portion of the energy consumers. In practical terms, that might be the majority of energy use being attributed to the smaller proportion who are wealthy enough to not care about their bills.

Or putting it another way without the waffle, I'd bet that a house in the south west needs less heating than an identical house in the north of Scotland.

 

My " new revised "charges from EDF
£251 per month = £3021 per annum,
Jenny namaste

 

Yes, the other tariff we were offered from BG was 5.125p with no standing charge.

It does make you wonder, are the energy companies taking a hit with those like myself who signed up to long term contracts before wholesale gas hit record highs. Which then contributes to the current high energy bills for consumers who are not on long term contracts?

 

I didn't know that they did such long term contracts, most I've ever seen was 2 yrs.

 

Lots of talk about inflation coming down by the end of the year, sounds good on the face of it, but I'm more interested in when prices will come down to somewhere near where they were, which is unlikely.
We appear to have been taken for a ride as usual, and will all be expected to breathe a sigh of relief when inflation goes back to 2% but we need a period of negative inflation to ever get back to where we started.
Cant see that ever happening.

 

Yeah, I'd like inflation to come down.
I'd much prefer it if prices were to come down.

 

I got a long-awaited quote today for the pergola that's supposed to support some photovoltaic panels sometime this century. What I took to be a handwritten € was in fact a 2, so it wasn't €3500 but 23500 That's without the panels! I think not....you could buy a lot of leccy (about 23 years-worth of summer use) for the cost of the pergola alone. The annoying thing is that friends in the village had a similar structure built for around €6k, so perhaps there's a coded message on our post box that signifies 'SUCKERS'??