Time to give electricity the flick?

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

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#1368654 18-Aug-2015 15:00

gchiu: Was there a power price spike last week?
My bills went up 30%

Hmm, thats interesting, my bills seemed to go up quite a bit as well.

gchiu

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#1368655 18-Aug-2015 15:02

Am I the only person who noticed???

miked

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#1368669 18-Aug-2015 15:15

I see no change to my cost. My unit prices on any given day were about the same as the daily pattern for previous weeks. I'm in Wellington.

Was it your unit prices, or your consumption that cause the cost increase? You should be able to tell what the cause was using the various graphs on the Flick website.

Mike

gchiu

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#1368698 18-Aug-2015 15:23

I see a 50% increase in daily costs, but the actual usage details and breakdown for this bill are all 0.
So, there's a bug in their report for that bill.

Teeps

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#1368715 18-Aug-2015 16:11

My bill is higher than usual but it was a cold week last week and I know I had used more power so it's not unexpected for me.
The bit that has surprised me is that final prices aren't available for both Saturday and Sunday (8/8 & 9/8) so they are estimated on the latest bill. What can happen to mean that final prices can't be calculated for such a long time? All other final prices are up to date to 16/8.

jonathan18

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#1369191 19-Aug-2015 11:19

My latest bill is also significantly higher than usual; partly this can be explained by colder weather over that period and one day with stupidly high usage (55.24 units!) when the installers were putting in the sensors for our ducted heatpump (clearly did a lot of testing!).

Actual average unit cost did increase a bit over the previous week (5.3 versus 6.1), which is also clearly a factor.

But I too have estimated amounts for the Saturday and Sunday, but it appears these are based on estimated usage, as they're far, far higher than our typical usage - 46 and 48 units respectively. Actual unit costs for these two days don't appear to be too different to other days (23-25c/unit, factoring in all costs).

I'm going to email Flick to see what the story is... It could indeed be the impact of running our new heating system (weekend so may have run it all day/night over that time), but it'll be useful to know why the data's still missing.

gchiu

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#1370197 19-Aug-2015 12:03

They haven't replied to my email yet from yesterday.

old3eyes

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#1370207 19-Aug-2015 12:21

I noticed when I was in the Gold Coast the other week that there were a lots of houses with solar power panels on their roofs. They must get more money that we get for feeding back into the grid and there's a lot more sun over there than here....

Regards,

Old3eyes

gchiu

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#1370213 19-Aug-2015 12:35

Installation is probably subsidized.

bazzer

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#1370233 19-Aug-2015 13:01

old3eyes: I noticed when I was in the Gold Coast the other week that there were a lots of houses with solar power panels on their roofs. They must get more money that we get for feeding back into the grid and there's a lot more sun over there than here....

Ditto in Hawaii. I also heard something on the radio about subsidies and maybe they were ending.

linw

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#1370240 19-Aug-2015 13:19

For hotter climes, solar makes more sense as they will be using it for cooling during the day.

richms

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#1370251 19-Aug-2015 13:40

old3eyes: I noticed when I was in the Gold Coast the other week that there were a lots of houses with solar power panels on their roofs. They must get more money that we get for feeding back into the grid and there's a lot more sun over there than here....

They had absurd subsidy and forced buy back rates over there. 50c a unit type crazy. That was ended some time ago but if you were on that rate and didnt move you kept getting it so there are some people over there that are creaming it and not wanting to move house for that reason ;)

As bad as the insulation subsidy scam we have to put up with over here.

Richard rich.ms

Stu

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#1379536 4-Sep-2015 09:30

Any comments/updates/changes/new issues with Flick? Our Mercury contract is up and we're thinking of heading to Flick, unless there are reasons not to.

Cheers and thanks

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timmmay

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#1379544 4-Sep-2015 09:43

Flick is good, just like every other company but lower prices. Key issue is risk of higher bills, but you can set alerts so you're aware of spikes, and you get used to how prices usually go. Putting your hot water on a timer would be a big win - we accidentally turned the hot water off Wednesday 5pm and the water was still warm Thursday late evening six showers later, so unless you have a large demand this could really reduce costs.

Power generators seem to have medium term plans to shut down power stations, which could increase peak costs, but that's not for a few years and you can change any time.

jonathan18

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#1379558 4-Sep-2015 09:47

Stu: Any comments/updates/changes/new issues with Flick? Our Mercury contract is up and we're thinking of heading to Flick, unless there are reasons not to.

Cheers and thanks

We've been pretty happy with Flick thus far (with them about six months now?), but we're yet to go through a summer. I've not seen any information (figures or anecodtal comments) from other Flick customers as to what their summer power bills were like, but my understanding is it's this period where customers could end up paying higher unit costs than those on fixed plans. Of course, winter's been great with the high storage levels and therefore abundant power - our bill has been an average of 20% lower, according to Flick, compared to our previous provider, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes over the next six months.

Of course, usage for many should also be lower in summer (unless say high usage of air con), so this will mitigate to a greater or lesser degree the possibility of higher summer power prices...

One thing I've noticed over the past few weeks is a growing number of days where the price isn't finalised for quite a few days (so is blank until it is finalised). I'd also like them to introduce the ability to download data directly - but these kinds of things are not deal-breakers for me...

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