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Tomato Energy - Lifestyle Tariff For EV Owners

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78K views 729 replies 58 participants last post by  tom66  
#1 · (Edited)
Just poked my nose in at the MSE forum and saw some recent posts re this new startup domestic energy supplier.


Did a quote online and key highlights are based on my post code (Merseyside) and having an EV

1. 12 month fixed price electricity only no exit fees - so prices locked in before expected Oct 1 - price rises
2. Standing charge 40.82p per day - currently paying 64.97p per day on Intelligent Octopus Go (IOG)
3. Overnight cheap rate 5p per KW/Hr (12am to 6am) currently 7p per KW/Hr on IOG (11.30pm to 5.30am)
4. Normal day rate 23.16p versus 23.54p on IOG - I have KIA EV and am now locked out of additional IOG daytime slots at the 7p rate.
5. Additional Daytime slot 9.30am to 12 noon at 13.37p
6. Additional Evening slot 10pm to midnight at 13.37p

Link here for you to look and confirm that I have not missed anything Tomato Energy

Also link to MSE forum page MSE Forum and link to MSE article that mentions this supplier MSE Article

Is this too good to be true? other folk are asking the same questions but I also see some people on the MG forum as having switched.

Thoughts / comments most welcome?
 
#3 ·
A few people are mentioning the same issue over and over again on Trustpilot. They don't seems to work well with Smart Meters or having issues reading the consumption.
Just one of the negative reviews bellow. All the positive are for easy signing process but after that......questionable:

"Incompetent or overburdened, I'm confused
I'm really confused by this company. I set up my account just over a month ago and the first communication I had was a request for a meter reading after a month. I asked why they needed this reading when I have a smart meter that sends readings every 30 minutes. The reply was it makes the readings more accurate! Ugh, so aren't meters accurate then?

Nevertheless, took a reading anyway but checking my online account today (which by the way is through a totally different website called MyWatts) there doesn't appear to be an initial reading when I was transferred to them (good job I took one myself then!). That will explain why the account shows no usage and no costs and I'm still waiting for the first bill (6 weeks into my account)!

Much of their literature talks about those without smart meters so i'm wondering if their system can't cope with them. What a shambles! Apart from the recent meter reading, I've heard nothing from them since the initial email to confirm the account was open. In some ways this is to be applauded, mostly we get far too much literature trying to upsell something or tell you how to read a meter, but such lack of communication from the outset is a bit concerning.

They appear to be quite a small company so have the taken on more than they can handle, or are they just incompetent? Well whatever, I'm on a cheap fixed tariff so it remains to be seen what happens when the next price cap comes in."
 
#4 ·
Purely from my POV
Tomato looks cheaper in every area than Octopus….but how much?

From my use case, 95% of my usage last year was at off peak
I bought 3500kwh of power

On this tariff
With Tomato, I would have saved 20p a day standing charge …£73
With Tomato, I would have saved 3p a kwh….£105

Yep…£15 a month cheaper👍

I have looked at Companies House at them.
Im sticking with Greg
 
#5 ·
Filing history is a bit....lets just say interesting. Regular changes of directors is more disturbing than anything...

 
#9 ·
Thanks everyone - will keep a watching brief, having been though the pain of Symbio and Neon Reef going under - somewhat still bruised. The Octopus experience and particularly the Customer Service which actually exists and will respond has value. So will see if folk who have actually joined respond and if they are being properly billed before moving.
 
#10 ·
Yes - Octopus are far from perfect, but their CS does actually function (seemingly best via twitter for me...) and their app and the IO integration with the car are great.

On a wider point - its FANTASTIC to see more Time Of Use (TOU) tariffs coming onto the market. Hopefully the start of a trend. And as a predominantly work from home household being able to load shift some stuff to during the day (as per Tomato hours) rather than overnight would help.
 
#11 ·
Yes - Octopus are far from perfect, but their CS does actually function (seemingly best via twitter for me...) and their app and the IO integration with the car are great.

On a wider point - its FANTASTIC to see more Time Of Use (TOU) tariffs coming onto the market. Hopefully the start of a trend. And as a predominantly work from home household being able to load shift some stuff to during the day (as per Tomato hours) rather than overnight would help.
Expect more soon..

Image
 
#13 ·
I switched last week to Tomato Energy so too recent to give any feedback. Indeed still waiting on final bill from Octopus but then I'm always waiting on Octopus to produce a bill, lol! Sometimes you get many months of trouble free bills then nothing and phoning them just takes days of your life... Never thought I'd leave Octopus but post pandemic/bulb it's as bad as BG, well almost, lol!
 
#17 ·
This is so very delayed, primarily because a few suppliers have objected saying they could not make the deadline.

This is really important. A friend of mine who used to work for a now-defunct energy supplier told me that it was possible to swap customers between HH and non-HH at will, so you could effectively arbitrate there, but it completely removed the incentive to actually encourage customers to save energy in constrained periods. Glad to see that will be changing.
Probably the more accurate reason for being unable to upgrade their systems
 
#18 · (Edited)
I checked the same thing for my usage, EV and Solar, GCE.

The late morning slot finishes at 11:30 so is buggerall use for cooking a quick meal to have at 12 so that's a bit disappointing but the biggest issue seems to be around having a gas supplier.

Is there a cheap gas supplier who would supply gas only and not try to stitch people up claiming discounts are given for dual fuel?

Gaz
 
#28 ·
Is there a cheap gas supplier who would supply gas only and not try to stitch people up claiming discounts are given for dual fuel?

Gaz
There were never many suppliers who would take on Gas only - we were with Zog but they folded during the energy crisis.
Don't know what would happen if you switched only Electricity away, could you be left with Gas only at your previous supplier ( e.g. Tomato Elec, and Octopus gas tracker? ).
 
#35 ·
It could be, there are a lot of points for temporal arbitrage. However, OFGEM will require this to be pretty much fully hedged so youthey won't be able to use the wholesale markets (day ahead) to move more around. Without in-day cross subsidy that 5p rate overnight would require (for Merseyside) that wholesale prices are less than ~ÂŁ16/MWh to even break even*. That is after VAT, DNO, Balancing, Policy are removed. Then accounting for losses and CfD supplier leave. I don't thin Tomato are making use of balancing services, but maybe they are. Keep in mind IO Go at 7p only requires wholesale prices to get below ~ÂŁ33/MWh in their slot without accounting for the balancing service capability. Plain go at 8.5p is ~ÂŁ46/MWh. That's between 2.1X and 2.9X the headroom.

* This is the best case as I may have missed some supplier costs
 
#41 ·
I'm in tears if there's any usage between 4 and 7 PM, recently agile has been knocking on for 40p

Gaz
 
#43 ·
What can I do with spare smart plugs?

Working from home draws ~30watts from the laptop, hmmm...

Set off-peak times for the laptop to charge 1am > 6am & 9:30 > 11:30 & 20:30 > 22:30 [latter not needed tho].

Unlike IOG no EV needs to be here for the daytime slots.

Nice!

Next smart plug please...
 
#46 ·
So, I've just switched today.
I can already see half hourly readings on the mywatts website which is promising.
However, it seems to be a bit unclear as to the actual half hourly times.
On the contract I received it listed the times like this:
00:00 23.12p, 00:30 23.12p, 01:00 5.56p, 01:30 5.56p etc

I thought that meant 00:30 - 0100 is 23.12p (so offpeak starts at 1am and ends at 6am)
However, looking at the download, those times are settlement times which I presume is the end of the time period

So basically 00:30 - 0100 is 5.56p

Same as Octopus Go.

It's especially confusing as the graph on the Tomato website suggests that the offpeak times are 1am-6am too

Am I reading that right. It's very confusing!
 
#49 · (Edited)
I'm not querying the local time / gmt thing (though that could be a different issue

I'm querying the exact slots as I think they have it wrong on the website graph, and the contract isn't clear.
I think as the bill download shows the units AND the cost that actual off peak is 0030-0530 and not 0100-0600. It may vary between location but you should check your CSV download.

Because the CSV has the cost (net of VAT) in pence, in column D, I presume they will just bill off of that total, add the daily standing charge and VAT.

The download shows in GMT, but the "time" is the end time of the half hour slot, not the start time.

For example - this is the download- my workings in green columns:
Image

So although it looks like the offpeak is 0100-0600 BST per the time in column F, because it is the end time (settlement time) - it's actually 0030-0530. As I say i can only deduce this because I put the car on to charge at 1am yet there is no noticeable charging in the first row (supposedly 1am, but it's actually the 0030-0100slot). Car also finished charging at 6am - but I've overshot the off peak period - if you look at the 1.165kWh consumption at peak rate of 23.12p. ie 0430AM GMT is the end time, so 0530BST, so I've paid peak rate to the 0530-0600 slot.
I can see Ofgem getting involved with this company!
 
#53 · (Edited)
I can only assume they have access to some sort of smart meter data - which is a little concerning from a privacy point of view as you can go and quote for any address you want and see how much energy they use.
I just ran the numbers on my mother's address and compared it to her annual consumption from Octopus, it wasn't a million miles out! I also ran it on my neighbours who have a hot tub and their consumption estimate is about double, so looks like it is based on some sort of real data! Bit concerning!
 
#56 ·
Looks like there may be some kind of summary data being held on the DCC. I did a quote and they found my import and export meters and also have some consumption data. It's in the ballpark annually but completely wrong monthly, so I hypothesise they have some kind of 12 month total and guess at the monthly from it.

Meters:

Image


Their guess:

Image


Actual:

Image