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Can we win the Gas and Electricity price wars by switching suppliers?

By: Lewis Taylor

We can all benefit from the current situation in the UK energy market but what should we do, who should we choose?

As a nation, many of us stay loyal to our Energy suppliers without a good explanation. We comment on how much last quarter's bill was or how much the direct debits has just gone up yet our attitudes towards switching plays right into the hands of those suppliers who simply aren't giving us the best deals.

The moment we hear anything to do with cheaper energy suppliers and switching our gas and electricity, we hear alarm bells ringing which drowns out the sound of the good information which might be coming to us. Are we too lazy to switch or just plain ignorant to the benefits?

We think nothing about driving an extra few miles to find a cheaper service station to fuel our cars, which probably saves us nothing as we've just wasted more fuel getting there and possible caused minor damage to the engine by sending all the rubbish from the bottom of the tank through the engine, would we make the same efforts to save money on our Gas and Electrity? Don't be ridiculous!

My take on all of this is simple, due to our ignorance and laziness, the big suppliers are laughing all the way to the bank. Millions of us have switched some form of monthly outgoing beit Mortgages, Mobile Phone bills, Home and Car Insurance - even Banks. Surely we can't be that lazy or ignorant - can we? We all strive to get the best deals when we buy a car or even when we go to the supermarket, so why do we insist on paying too much for our Energy.

It's not the fault of the suppliers, if they have millions of customers, why should they drop their prices? The fact is that there are better deals out there and many of the lower priced suppliers have high levels of customer service too. We constantly moan about the price of our gas and electricity and yet we still refuse to budge.

What seems to be stuck in our minds is that when the market was deregulated, armies of door knockers were mobilized and sent out in their hundreds to catch us just as we sat down for our dinner. By switching our suppliers with them we might have a brand new Bentley on our drives go off for a 3 month cruise around the Carribean! Ok maybe not but you get the idea. People were writing into TV's Watchdog in their masses complaining about how they haven't saved any money or they haven't received a statement for 9 months and just got hit with a huge bill. Nowadays, there are very tight regulations that energy companies must adhere to in order to satisfy it's customers.

With this in mind we should now feel quite happy about energy switching and yet we still do nothing about it. Before we had a good excuse to do nothing, now we do not have that luxury as energy companies have great levels of customer service and they offer excellent deals saving many households around £330 a year. If we could save this much on fuel for our cars, the queue would be a mile long. You can even use companies such as Money Angels to switch compare energy prices as they also show levels of customer service too.

In answer to the question posed earlier, we can win out of the Energy price wars, we just have to shop around and realise that it takes no time at all to switch, and if we want to switch again, we can simply do so. Suppliers only require 28 days notice and there are many companies that will take care of the whole switch for you. The key is for us all to stop complaining and do something about, only then will we all be winning consumers in the Energy price wars.

Article Source: http://www.approvedarticles.com

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