Time to give electricity the flick?

Forums › Home Workshop DIY › Time to give electricity the flick?

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124 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 9

#2116732 30-Oct-2018 12:28

Hammerer:

Ask Flick!

Probably not anything nefarious.

Invoiced.com provide invoicing services and Flick Electric is one of their customers.

yep, I did in their twitter. But the email looks fishy, and that account was closed a year ago :-S

Hammerer

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#2116851 30-Oct-2018 13:45

I'd imagine it is a mistake, e.g. someone requested a statement and the wrong account was selected, or they've done a statement run with the wrong parameters or a test gone wrong. There are so many reasonable possibilities for why this could happen.

zerkms

124 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 9

#2116941 30-Oct-2018 16:15

I've got a response from their twitter support team

"

Ah, we have been getting in touch with customers who have old credits on accounts. Invoiced.com is the invoicing service we use. Email & credit is legit, but get that it might look a bit suspect to people so we’re figuring out a better way to communicate this! Cheers

"

Not sure what to do now with that extra $100 credit given I had to switch to genesis in a new house and locked there for another year :-S

pauls25

12 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 1

#2117587 31-Oct-2018 21:17

miked:

So I've just made the change to Contact. The maths says it should save me money most weeks compared to being with Flick... and will save me lots when the prices are high like now. Only because this Contact deal is so good, not because Flick was bad (this is just exceptional deal).

I have just also moved to Contact but I have discovered that the actual rates charged are higher than the rates they display on their website. Mine were around 1c/kWh higher than advertised making them higher than Flick's fixie rates. This is after taking into account the prompt payment discounts. Something to take into account especially if signing up to a fixed term plan with break fees.

To be fair the website rates do say estimated but this practise doesn't appear to be practised by other power company. I would imagine that a petrol station would be heavily fined for doing something like this on their price boards.

I have contacted Contact for clarification and may well switch back.

Aredwood

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#2117635 1-Nov-2018 01:35

pauls25:
miked:

So I've just made the change to Contact. The maths says it should save me money most weeks compared to being with Flick... and will save me lots when the prices are high like now. Only because this Contact deal is so good, not because Flick was bad (this is just exceptional deal).

I have just also moved to Contact but I have discovered that the actual rates charged are higher than the rates they display on their website. Mine were around 1c/kWh higher than advertised making them higher than Flick's fixie rates. This is after taking into account the prompt payment discounts. Something to take into account especially if signing up to a fixed term plan with break fees.

To be fair the website rates do say estimated but this practise doesn't appear to be practised by other power company. I would imagine that a petrol station would be heavily fined for doing something like this on their price boards.

I have contacted Contact for clarification and may well switch back.

It could be the type of metering or load control setup that you have. For example, you viewed the prices for houses that have ripple controlled hot water. When your house actually doesn't have ripple control installed.

You might have also been placed onto the wrong plan. EG, your house has ripple controlled hot water, but you have ended up on the plan that is intended for houses without ripple control by mistake. This actually happened to me ages ago, and my power company at the time (Mercury Energy). Wouldn't change me back until they sent someone to my house, to confirm if I actually had controlled hot water.

Aredwood

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#2117636 1-Nov-2018 02:12

pctek:
Aredwood:Back when I was with Flick, I saved over $1000 according to their built in savings calculator.
Main reason I switched away was actually to do with politics. Namely that it is a Labour/ greens government in power. .

All depends who you switched from. According to their calculator....hmm, I prefer to do my own, usinf rates and actual usages.

And you changed because of a govt?? How odd. Nothing to do with their horrendous charges now of course.

The Green party have previously protested against, and often successfully helped block the construction of major hydro generation projects. Look up Project Aqua for an example of this. And a previous Labour government introduced the disastrous low user regulations.

And National fast tracked the consent process for new geothermal power stations. As a benefit to Maori tribal interests (and a benefit to other Maoris and the rest of the country via lower power prices). Which also forced the closure of the Otahuhu B and Southdown Gas power stations. And almost caused the Huntly coal generation to close as well. Reason - wholesale power prices were too low on average.

Demand has since caught up with the amount of available generation capacity. You now have rapidly increasing numbers of EVs (completely new demand). The winter energy payment (imagine if only 10% of that becomes new spending on electricity, that is still a lot of new demand) More heatpumps continue to be installed (new demand if they replace gas or solid fuel heating).

Recent new generation is only 19MW of new geothermal (tail end of above National party policy). And the 100MW Junction Rd open cycle gas power station (still under construction) And when complete, will have a lower energy efficiency than what the Otahuhu B power station had.

And James Shaw from the Green party says that he wants to flood NZ with secondhand EVs. Normally I would agree with more EVs. But where is the power needed to run them during dry years going to come from? We need to start building more large scale hydro generation NOW! And more wind generation, and more geothermal generation.

No signs yet from the current government that that is going to happen. The lower carbon emissions by itself should have been enough of a reason to do so. It all comes down to higher demand + artificial restrictions on new supply = higher prices.

heapsort

249 posts

Master Geek
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#2117645 1-Nov-2018 06:19

We're on Fixie now. Will review spot prices regularly and switch back to Freestyle when it seems suitable.

When the current high spot prices started I was reluctant to switch to Fixie at first because of two misconceptions, which I'm happy I was wrong about.

Misconception 1: I thought there was no way to leave Fixie within 6 months while remaining with Flick. Turns out there's a small break fee, per month of the six Fixie months remaining, which is fair enough.

Misconception 2: I thought Fixie was a single 24/7 rate, for weekdays and overnight/weekends, and I wasn't too keen on paying over 20 c/kWh for overnight EV charging and our usual weekend stuff: laundry, baking, lawns, etc. But I now see it is two fixed rates: our Fixie overnight rate is around 8 c/kWh lower than daytime.

(Edit: a word or two for clarity)

Stasis007

85 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#2118212 2-Nov-2018 09:09

heapsort:

Misconception 2: I thought Fixie was a single 24/7 rate, for weekdays and overnight/weekends ...

Bugger. I thought the same. Although on re-reading the website it's clearer in retrospect: generation price is fixed but they pass on the transmission/distribution off-peak rate. Unfortunately the only kWh figure they present is via their property comparison between Freestyle and Fixie, and is not entirely useful since it's a guesstimated daily average.

Ah well. You live and learn.

A bit rough this morning though! Why does it take so long to switch power providers??

michaelmurfy

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#2118219 2-Nov-2018 09:31

Stasis007:

heapsort:

Misconception 2: I thought Fixie was a single 24/7 rate, for weekdays and overnight/weekends ...

Bugger. I thought the same. Although on re-reading the website it's clearer in retrospect: generation price is fixed but they pass on the transmission/distribution off-peak rate. Unfortunately the only kWh figure they present is via their property comparison between Freestyle and Fixie, and is not entirely useful since it's a guesstimated daily average.

A bit rough this morning though! Why does it take so long to switch power providers??

Just honestly switch to Fixie for now. Their site displays the rate:

You can now switch to Fixie in the Flick portal (on a desktop browser only) under My Account --> My Pricing Plan IIRC. It is the easiest option and they'll backdate you a bit to ease the pain. I've found their prices to be very competitive.

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gchiu

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#2118366 2-Nov-2018 10:24

We don't need large scale hydro. We need something that least impacts the environment such as wind, geothermal and maybe tidal. And lots of distributed microgeneration on roof tops.

And to stay on topic, I switched to Fixie last week.

robertsona

170 posts

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#2118370 2-Nov-2018 10:29

gchiu:

We don't need large scale hydro. We need something that least impacts the environment such as wind, geothermal and maybe tidal. And lots of distributed microgeneration on roof tops.

And to stay on topic, I switched to Fixie last week.

Have a look at the actual contribution of wind power generation (https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data) during this, or any, high price period...

darkasdes2

433 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 80

#2118372 2-Nov-2018 10:31

gchiu:

We don't need large scale hydro. We need something that least impacts the environment such as wind, geothermal and maybe tidal. And lots of distributed microgeneration on roof tops.

Stasis007

85 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#2118379 2-Nov-2018 10:54

michaelmurfy:
Just honestly switch to Fixie for now. Their site displays the rate:

That was sorta the problem, their site doesn't show their rate (at least not that I can see), just a rough guessamation of your daily average. Most my usage is at night so it would have been more competitive than they appear. Had I known the fixed generation price I would definitely have switched a week or two ago!

I switched providers a week or so back, just waiting for them to activate me.

jpwise

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Ultimate Geek
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#2118387 2-Nov-2018 11:14

It's probably already been linked elsewhere, but there is a pricing schedule for fixie (scroll down to nitty gritty section) on their website. https://www.flickelectric.co.nz/pricing/

I ended up changing to fixie the other week as well. $69/wk was the last 'high' one i had, then back down to ~$30/wk on fixie.

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Hammerer

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#2118406 2-Nov-2018 11:46

gchiu:

We don't need large scale hydro. We need something that least impacts the environment such as wind, geothermal and maybe tidal. And lots of distributed microgeneration on roof tops.

And to stay on topic, I switched to Fixie last week.

I mainly used the Flick app to see what was happening with nationwide generation when my prices were going up or down. As far as I could see, wind generation didn't keep my prices down at all.

What you say sounds attractive but in practice this approach tends to fail to account for the actual environmental costs and falls foul of NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitudes:

In my region, concern over local environmental impact has effectively precluded establishing new wind farms in the most suitable zones because they are all visible from urban areas. Tidal would fall foul of the same attitudes and probably impact fishermen. wind surfers, divers and other saltwater users.
Microgeneration is often less efficient overall and our assessment of it frequently ignores a whole larger set of environmental impacts which we don't notice in NZ because the manufacturing impacts are overseas. I prefer that we did notice them but I'm observing that we seem to be happy to blithely ignore the environmental costs that aren't visible within our living zones.

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