Talking to people at the Mini Enviro Expo of Whitehorse City Council’s Sustainable Living 2024 program, I was drawn to my old One personal home transition story post to help describe the cash benefits to electrifying our life.
But the chart there is looking a bit old, a couple of things have happened, so it needs and update.
A quick refresher, this charts our home energy cost as an annual rolling average updating with monthly billing, sign-posting significant events.
- Going all electric, losing gas bills, our electricity bill including heating rising to less than our earlier electricity and gas bill.
- Finally putting on solar PV, pushing down our electricity bill.
- Buying an electric car.
That’s where I left off, with the expectation that the annual cost would climb with the added transport costs. Which it did, to a level about the same as our first move all electric.
That is our total house, heating, hot water and car energy costs are still less than our home-only costs before getting off gas.
So that’s where we have been, and it’s all taken for granted. But there is one more key milestone starting about January 2023.
A cautionary tail engaging the retail market
I went to change retailer. I used the compare.energy.vic.gov.au that has all offers from retailers in Victoria, let them get my interval meter data from AEMO, and present the best offers based on our actual pattern of usage. I found what I thought was a good offer and I went to the company website. I won’t name the retail because this is more about my behaviour than theirs.
The switch went through, the usual messages came saying here we are, there’s 10 days cooling off, etc. Then one message I should have paid closer attention to: that the tariff I had chosen was not compatible with my meter configuration, and I was being placed on another tariff instead. Okay, I thought, I’ll deal with that later.
You can see the result – for the first time since we went all electric our energy costs jump to over $2000, and stayed there. I didn’t notice they change at first, it’s a monthly bill, we would have had air-con running.
When I put the running annual total together again, I still didn’t twig at first to the change over time. Then I did, and I got angry with my retailer for putting me on a tariff I did not want to be on.
But I did not call them, I did not ask for a better offer, I did not compare offers again, or when I did I did not go the next step and make a switch.
Then I got angry, with myself. Now I have paid around $600 I didn’t need to, because I didn’t want to spend the time on a few phone calls.
Now I have finally compared the market and switched retailer to a better offer – I expect to spend around $500 less than I would have with my previous retailer.
It’s called the lazy tax, and we all fall for it.
If you have not compared retailer market offers in 12 months, take the time to do so now.