With the rising costs of energy there is a way to save money on all of your domestic utility bills.
Becoming a distributor or customer gatherer for The Utility Warehouse means that working part time and with a little effort you can cover all of your gas, electricity, phone, mobile and broadband costs.
Have BT raised their prices again?
Last September BT changed their billing structure and started charging by the minute instead of per second. This increase was hidden in the small print leaving many phone users unaware that prices had effectively increased.
Well they’re now putting a 3p call set-up charge on every call made. This means that the minimum charge for a daytime call lasting less than 1 minute is now 6p. That’s more than 20% more expensive than the cheaper providers.
Nice one BT
Various companies have announced that they will be lowering their energy prices in the spring. This is excellent news for all consumers.
I doubt that any company is going to make a move until British Gas make their announcement which will probably happen after the 22nd February when they announce their annual profits.
In the meantime it’s a case of watch and wait.
British Gas is not only the UK’s most expensive energy provider, it also provides the worst customer service according to research from Energywatch. The consumer watchdog said complaints about British Gas in the six months to September were twice last year’s total, while complaints about its rivals fell.
The top problems were inaccurate bills and the lack of response to enquiries.
BG are investing £400 million to transform the way it deals with it’s customers with new billing systems and better trained front line staff. That equates to approximately £23.50 that each of it’s 17 million customers are paying just to get decent support………….what you thought that BG would finance this from their own coffers! They’re hardly going to do that are they, just think what that would do to the shareholders’ dividends and the directors’ bonuses.
The Utility Warehouse Discount Club recently launched a new broadband service with bundled line rental and inclusive calls. Called ‘Broadcall‘ the new service offers an 8Mb connection speed and a 40 Gig monthly download limit for less than £20 a month for all lines that have been LLUed.
Because this includes your line rental charges, which could be £12 a month if you currently pay BT quaterly, this means the broadband connection is only £8.
If the line hasn’t been LLUed then the cost is less than £28 per month which still offers remarkable savings when compared with the other major broadband suppliers in the UK.
The key benefits are:
For customers with more than 1 PC then upgrading to Broadcall Plus gives unlimited downloads and a free wireless router, all for £24.99.
One of the other benefits is that customers can add other home services such as energy and mobiles phones to give more benefits and the ease of a single fully itemised monthly bill.
For more information visit Broadcall.
Back in August, BT announced a range of price cuts with savings in excess of 31% for some of it’s packages.
What they managed to hide was the fact that for most families, those that can least afford it, the cost of a call would in fact go up and they will be worse off.
This is because they have stopped billing by the second and will now round up all calls to the nearest minute. So a call lasting 4 minutes and 1 second will be charged as a 5 minute call. This means that the call will cost approximately 3p more than before. With 16 million customers, all of those extra £0.03ps will very quickly become £10,000s and all at the expense of the elderly or infirm who need the phone as a lifeline to the outside world.
Shame on you BT.
So Npower has announced their third rise in domestic gas prices this year, with it’s customers paying an extra 17.2% for the privalege of heating their homes and cooking with Npower gas. This means that from October 1st. there will be, on average, an increase of £92 per annum for Npower’s customers.
Npower’s first price increase this year was back in January with a rise of 15% and then again in April by another 15%.
What this means is that, since January 2006, Npower’s gas prices has increased by a massive 55%.
It was reported that a spokesperson for the company promised that there would not be any further increases this year.
What is scandalous about this latest price increase is that the wholesale price of gas has come down over the last 4 months by more than 20%. So yet again the poor British consumer suffers.
Just before people start to think that I’m singling Npower out, also worthy of mention are the following:
British Gas increased their prices by 22% in March and a further 12.4% this month. A 37% increase this year.
Powergen increased their prices by 24.4% in March and 18.4% in August. A 47% increase this year.
And finally EDF Energy who increased their gas prices by 14.7% in March and 19% in July. A 36% increase this year.
So unless the weather is going to be particularly mild this winter, it looks like some households may be in for a bleak Christmas.
