Are energy price comparison figures accurate?

Why you can rely on Onedox

Let’s start with a definition:

What are ‘available energy savings’ ?

The standard method for a price comparison site to calculate your ‘available energy savings’ looks at your annual energy costs if you switch to a new tariff today and compares that to how much you’d spend if you didn’t switch.

But there is a major fault with this method:

It doesn’t allow for the fact that today, yes, you might save money by switching, but by staying put, you save more money.

If you are on a low priced energy tariff today, it makes sense to stay on that tariff as long as you can before switching, right?

Right. Except a regular price comparison website does not have such layers of complexity: they simply tell you how much you can save by switching today but they don’t tell you if you should wait to switch in order to maximise your savings.

But how can they say you have ‘available savings’ if you are on the best priced deal, you ask?

This is because of how savings are traditionally calculated. Let’s go back to the definition of ‘available energy savings’ from the start but focus on that last little bit: “…how much you’d spend if you didn’t switch”.

This means that these tools are not just comparing your current tariff’s pricing against those available on the market (which would make sense!).

No. These tools are assuming that your costs for the next 12 months are: your current tariff plus the expensive ‘standard variable tariff’ that your provider would charge you once your current tariff ends.

This method inflates your assumed costs for the next 12 months and therefore makes any available deals much more attractive in comparison.

This is why there are always ‘available savings’ even though you’re on a good price already — the data is inflated and no one is telling you if you should wait before switching.

This also explains why you might find ‘higher’ savings on a Price Comparison Site or with another company — they are reporting the savings in an inflated way.

So we decided to fix the broken system.

We stopped calculating savings in the traditional way. Instead we thought:

Let’s tell our users when is the right time for them to switch, and not before.

I know, crazy right?

So when calculating ‘available energy savings’, Onedox does not make the assumption that you will just ‘do nothing’ and roll onto your provider’s most expensive tariff.

Instead, Onedox looks at your energy costs on a monthly basis and tells you by how much your actual energy bills would go down if you switched to a new tariff today.

Onedox also makes sure your ‘available energy savings’ are what we call ‘immediate savings’ — i.e. that the new rate is cheaper than the one you’re on now. That your costs will go down immediately. That you’ll actually save.

And that means that if you don’t have ‘immediate savings’, then Onedox will recommend that you wait, stay on your current tariff, and notify you when you actually do have savings.

It’s that simple!

By taking just a slightly different perspective of ‘available savings’, we’ve been able to have a big impact — helping our users switch on the days when they can save the most money, and not before.