How we saved over £300 a year by switching energy provider

Being a grown-up can be dull at times, no? For me, there is nothing more mind-numbingly dull than thinking about bills. Council tax bills, energy bills, grocery bills… it’s all a bit… meh. However, while I don’t enjoy having to think about this stuff, I DO enjoy saving money. The less money spent on the essentials and less interesting stuff, the more we get to spend on fun stuff. So, every now and again, I put my big girl pants on and force myself to be a grown-up.

Recently, we decided to do a bit of a family budget overhaul. We changed up our meal plans, reorganised how we do our grocery shopping and finally put our minds to something we’d been putting off for ages… taking a proper look at how much we spend on energy.

We’d been with the same energy supplier for electricity and gas since we moved in at the end of 2013 and, four and a half years later, it was time to do a bit of a review and check we were getting the best deal for our money. It turns out, we weren’t.

I’d always put this task off, thinking it would be a major hassle to switch, or that we’d have to pay a huge get-out of contract fee to our current supplier. Plus, looking at energy bills is no one’s idea of fun really, is it? However, a quick glance at the Energy Switch Guarantee website proved me wrong. While you can’t switch via the website, and Energy UK don’t sell any products via their site, they do provide lots of easily digestible information about how to make a switch. Within five minutes I was convinced it was a move worth looking into.

I did a quick comparison on one of the recommended websites using information about our energy consumption on our latest bill. Within minutes I’d found our current supplier was at the bottom of the list of cheapest suppliers for our area. If we changed to a different supplier we’d save over £300 a year – not a figure to be sniffed at.

I’d worried before that switching supplier was a headache inducing task, requiring hours on the phone to call centre staff and looking up reams of indecipherable energy unit numbers. I was wrong. The whole transfer process is handled by the provider you’re switching to, and it only takes 21 days. Simon was concerned we’d have a gap in supplier while they moved us over, but that’s not the case either. You continue to use your existing provider right up to the point you switch. It’s so painless you don’t even realise it’s happening!

The Energy Switch Guarantee website answered all of our questions before we’d even looked into other suppliers, and it was comforting to know we weren’t being “sold at” while we were looking into it all. It’s just free, impartial, easy to understand advice. A quick five minutes of reading then a 30 second investigation online ended up saving us more than £300. That’s the quickest £300 I’ve ever earned!

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Thanks to Energy UK for working with me on this post. For more information about how I work with brands check out my Work With Me page.