Energy companies

For about the last twenty years, if they've existed for all that time, we have been customers of one electricity supplier. The difference in charges between them never made it worth my while to mess about calculating the worth of switching and I have better things to do. They've never Contacted me in the whole of my time as their customer.

A couple of weeks ago I initiated a switch because Farmlands offered a deal tied in with the company with whom they deal. I doubt it will make much financial difference, but the payments will all go out together, which makes my management a little simpler.

Since then we've received at least three calls from the original company offering us "incentives" to stay with them. I will write to them and ask why they don't spend all that time and effort making annual calls to their loyal customers and making sure they're happy, instead of only noticing us when we've opted to leave.

The same sort of dicking about annoys me with other firms and organisations as well: "join now and go in the draw for ...", "join now and get $100 off your first bill...". What about offering the same deals to the people who stayed?

Customer "service" is all over the wrong place these days.

Ruth, I couldn't agree more. Very well said!!

Cheers, Mich.

We had the same thing happen when we switched last year. Dh got really angry on the phone and said, "if you can't be honest enough to offer us the best price always, then I don't want to do business with you anyway." We didn't get any more phone calls.

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Couldn't agree more. We were with Meridian for over 35 years. Then started looking about when we saw Meridian making wonderful offers to new customers. So we shopped around, went back to meridian with all the new offers. They said sorry can't offer you anything, so it was bye bye from us. Now with Contact one of only 2 companies that will buy back our solar power (the other being Meridian) and very happy. When we first chose Contact, we made a choice to leave them a year later and got paid $250 to stay for 2 years. Pays to negotiate.

We left Contact for Meridian many years ago, when CRT negotiated a big incentive to change. I have contacted Meridian once, copy to CRT, and the topic was cleared up very rapidly indeed. Thus we are very happy with the way that Farmlands are working with Meridian. ......But power buy-back from PVC solar stinks (.

We are with Mercury, but I am not entirely happy with their high handedness. We were supposed to have a new house meter installed at no cost, but I put them off, because we were proposing to do away with the barn meter running water pump and electric fence for which we were charged commercial rates against a $12 months use of power and a whopping $70 rental on the meter! I explained we were changing the way the power was delivered, and saved them the process of installing a meter twice. When the new meter went in to solve the second meter problem, they charged us well over $200 to put in the new meter, with a penalty component for the loss of their other rented meter, which was returned! Go figure how a free meter could become so expensive. I guess they were taking a double bite of the cake as now our power charges are not only minus the barn component, but are about $20 a month cheaper for the house making me think that their old meter was a "creeper" model!

We changed from Trustpower to Meridian when we installed our PV. Meridian were then paying 1:1 so it was a no-brainer.

Following Meridian's latest buy-in rate drop (which was accompanied by a supply price rate increase) we crunched the numbers and discovered that even though TP's supply rate was slightly higher than Meridian the TP 'Prompt Payment Discount of 15% (compared to Meridian's PPD of 10%) offset this. The portion offset by our PV generation is regarded as 'promptly paid for'.

TP offer a 7c/kWh buy-in tariff for exported generation year-round which is the same as Meridian's (7 month long) "summer" buy-in rate, and we're quite happy to pay approximately 30-50c/day over winter to a privately owned company, and one that doesn't spout about their sustainable generation while increasingly shafting their PV generating customers [}]

Our situation allows us to consume a large portion of our own generation by way of an electric vehicle and obviously the economics of different supply deals will change for each customer's circumstances so well worth crunching your own numbers [?]

We are with Trustpower. I believe them to be the best of a bad lot.