Thursday continued - Jehovah's Witness, Utility prices

I've had a busy couple of days since my last post about the flowers opening.

Just after I posted it we had a knock on the door, followed by a "bang" - the visitor had rapped on the glass by the door with his walking stick! I was reminded of the opening chapter of "The Hobbit" in which the wizard Gandalf bangs on Bilbo's front door with his staff. However, when I opened the door there was no tall, impressive, wizard in front of me, but a rather short, stout man wearing a tweed jacket and a Tyrolean style hat. So he looked more like a hobbit. He said to me "What is the name of your God?" which I thought was an interesting opening line. We had about 5 minutes discussion about the nature of the Trinity (which he said was "lies, all lies"), whether Jesus was the son of God and the existence of the Holy Ghost. I wished him good luck on his mission as I closed the door, but privately I was wondering how successful he was being by telling people that their faith was "lies" and trying to damage their front doors. "She who must be obeyed" said after he had gone that she was ready to have a major discussion on the divinity (or not) of Jesus, but she didn't come to the door. She suggested a couple of arguments that I could have used - "why didn't you ask him to explain Pentecost?" - but I wasn't going to ask him to come back.

An hour later the door knocker went again. This time my visitor was a young man in jeans and a tee shirt from Southern Electric asking whether I had taken advantage of recent price changes for my power supply. I said I had checked our tariff (which was sort of true) and that we were okay thank you and sent him on his way. Back inside we discussed it - notably that our last electric bill had been for £75 for the month whereas a year ago we had been paying £55.

I dug out the old bills; I went onto the web site for our provider (EDF Energy); I spent an hour with a spreadsheet working out how the usage became the charge (the first 900 KWh used per year [pro-rata for the billing period] are charged at tariff A, the balance is at tariff B - so you need a formula to calculate the "split" between tariffs and then the sum becomes a straight addition between the two, plus taxes, etc.). Having done this for the electricity I found that of course the cost had gone up, but also our usage was up by around 2000 KWh per year. 

We discussed this and worked out that most of it was because I had been at home most of the year, so the kettle and lights had been on more. But also, the computer had been on for an additional 6 hours per day and this was the bulk of the extra usage.

We adjusted the computer's power settings so that it would go to standby sooner (screen off after 20 minutes, standby after 1 hour).

I then went on to a price comparison website to see if we were on the best deal. At first it appeared that we could save £250 per year, but then I realised that the website had miscalculated the amount we actually spent based on the values I had put in for our usage in KWh (kilowatt hours). So I went back and put in the amounts in pounds rather than the values in KWh. This time it miscalculated the usage at which point I realised that either the site had faults in its code or it was designed to make you think you could save money when that may not be the case. Lets be charitable, there must be so many variables to take into account that it has to be a simplistic calculation and hence it cannot be relied upon. There is probably a disclaimer somewhere on the site.

I looked in more detail at the tariff proposed that would save me £250 per year. The charge for each KWh was higher than we are paying at the moment, the break to move to tariff B was earlier though and there was a standing charge on top of the basic usage. I decided to modify my spreadsheet to allow me to change the variables and see the effect. So that's a bigger project - watch this space!

The lesson for the day though is to doubt the truth of the words on the price comparison sites. It is not just a simple choice, nor is it made easy for you to decide which provider to use as you are not comparing "like with like". I guess that could extend to the door-step discussion on faith too, but I am not going to change my beliefs based on whether or not my church gives me loyalty points or better value for money: you just know when it is right for you.