Posts Tagged ‘domestic’

Last month, Ofgem decided that EDF Energy were ripping me off so much that they forced EDF Energy to send me a letter telling me how much they were ripping me off and that I should switch to a new provider immediately.

When I first got the letter, I was annoyed.

First, this was now something I had to deal with it. Until now, I had been telling myself that when I moved in, I did an energy price comparison and found that EDF was the cheapest supplier. And they had been at every other property I had ever sorted electricity out for, too. So, it seemed logical they would still be the cheapest.

Second, I then felt like an idiot for not doing anything about it for so long. Especially given it literally took me less than five minutes to switch providers, from first putting in my details to getting to the “congratulations” screen.

So, the whole business has made me feel crap.

But, on the plus side, we’re not switching to Bulb Energy, which is going to save us several hundred pounds per year. And they use 100% renewable energy, which means I can feel morally superior, too.

The moral of the story is that even if your provider has been the cheapest in the past, it might not be now. No doubt it is engineered to be this way. According to Which, smaller providers typically have higher levels of customer satisfaction, too, so it’s worth putting your details into a price comparison site once a year. Or now. Now is a great time.

Those of you who are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy will know that warmth, comes right at the bottom, on level one, along with food and shelter. It, therefore, seems quite odd to me that we don’t take it particularly seriously.

Take our apartment for example. It’s too warm in the summer (so much so that they felt the need to install an air conditioning unit) and too cold in the winter. So was my last apartment, and the house I lived in before that. In fact, here is me moaning about it in 2008. My parent’s house and student halls seem to be the only places that were ever capable of properly regulating temperature.

I was quite hopefully when we moved into a posh, very well furnished apartment in February, that we had finally found somewhere that was properly heated. It had a fancy system where you could set your temperature range and it would do the rest.

But, after months of fiddling with it, we don’t seem to be able to make it do what we want to do. How hard is it to maintain a constant temperature? It’s not like we moved into an old build, Nest was probably already around when they furnished the place.

Worse still, the very design of the building is just stupid. The radiator is right next to the bed, rather than below the window. This means when it is on, it blasts Elina’s head with heat the whole night while her feet, down the other end of the bed, are cold because of their proximity to the window. You have to go out of your way to design a system so badly.

Not to mention that all of this is on electric heating, so costs us three times as much as it should.

Roll on Gene Roddenberry’s glorious future, it might be socialist, but at least you will be able to set the temperature of your quarters.