Energy Best Buy Websites Exposed by The Daily Telegraph

So it is not just financial comparison websites you need to watch out for!

Here is an extract from an article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 10th October 2009:

Kara Gammell reported in the Telegraph's Your Money supplement:

An investigation of comparison websites by Your Money reveals there can be more than 50 per cent between the cheapest and the most expensive "best buy" energy deals.

"The banner at the top of the webpage read: "Accredited by Consumer Focus, which means that our prices are the same as other comparison websites."But when I went shopping for a cheaper energy tariff, that didn't appear to be the case at all.In a bid to reduce my energy bills this winter, I visited four leading comparison websites, Confused, uSwitch, GoCompare and Moneysupermarket and was shocked to find different results from each."

All four of the aforementioned comparison websites are accredited by the Consumer Focus Confidence Group (it actually sounds made up) which in theory means each of the sites should return similar results.

Turns out they all calculate things slightly differently and you need to put in your exact energy consumption by units in some cases.Sounds like a fair bit of flannel to me, surely if you are putting in similar data to similar websites the results should not differ by a huge amount but in this case the highest quote was £680 and the lowest was £431 a huge difference of £249.

But I have saved the best till last, the most expensive quote which was provided by uSwitch was actually more expensive than the customer pays at the moment. I can only assume the journalist decided to go with Confused.

The lesson to be learned here is that no matter if you are using a financial comparisons website or one that deals with utilities you should always use at least two or three different websites to check your findings.

Another thing worth remembering is that each of the sites mentioned has a Consumer Finance or Money element to them. They say they offer the best deals on mortgages, credit cards, savings and loans but can you trust them in light of what The Daily Telegraph have reported? You can make your own mind up on that one.

Here at http://www.thebestbestbuys.com/ we will keep monitoring the big and the small alike and we will only bring you the best best buys in the UK for mortgages, loans, credit cards and savings.