Atlantic Electric and Gas Review

Overall Rating

At the time of making my choice, this lot were cheap. You can email them about anything and they always send a confirmation. This is good if you need to prove a correspondence, but I have never had anything other than acknowledgement by email.

You can spend ages on hold on their helpline on 0870 national rate tariff (3 x the cost of calling the USA). They are hopeless at any changes to your account. If you move house or want to cancel, they just can't handle it. They are also no longer the cheapest.

This has to be the most incompetent company I have ever had dealings with. When I moved house the first time I expected to switch all the details over to the new address, just like BT. Instead you have to cancel your direct debits and start them up again. What a waste of time. It took ages to get a refund off them. When I moved house the second time I decided to cancel completely and gave them details of the landlord's agent who would deal with utility bills from that date on. They logged this and just didn't do anything with it. Again they didn't cancel the direct debit and took two months extra cash they weren't entitled to. This time I got smart - use the Direct Debit Guarantee. It's great. You just call your bank, tell them to pull back those transactions and they do it. Atlantic (or whoever) has to then chase you to get that money if they really think they're entitled to it. Six months later they started sending me demands via their debt collectors for that money. It all went to the same address, and got to me by the Royal Mail redirection service because it was in my name, right ? So the new tenants were not even getting a bill and Atlantic were making demands of me - all because they never bothered taking action of the fact that I had left. In the end, I had to collar some poor chap on their helpline, make him acknowledge that I no longer had a contract with them (they record all their helpline calls) and agree to MY contract: if they bother me again then I would charge them 25 pounds to write them a letter telling them to look at their own records. I have not heard a peep since, but if I do I will be charging them for my time. The chap even admitted that they had a backlog of 600 COTs (Change of Tenancy - their terminology and abbreviation). Considering that this company doesn't actually generate electricity, they just trade it, customer service should the biggest part of their operation. Well, they don't do that either - they're hopeless, leave well alone.