What you should know about gas and electricity for a micro business

If you own a micro business, then you will be pleased to know that you have a lot of freedom if you desire to access a better business electricity or gas contract. Therefore, you need to make sure that you arrange a new energy deal that can help grow your business. In most cases, you can do this when you still have at least thirty days before the expiry of your current business energy contract. You don’t need to worry if you are not sure when your current energy deal expires because your energy supplier is required to contact you before the contract ends.

They usually contact you to inform you about your energy usage each year and offer information on the energy price of your current energy deal. Having this information can help put you in a better position to do business energy comparison and negotiate for a favorable energy deal when your current energy contract approaches its expiry date. Therefore, you can decide to take the same energy contract or switch to a new one. This page discusses what you should know about gas and electricity for a micro business.

A micro business

You can consider your business to be a micro business if it doesn’t use more than 100,000 kWh of electricity each year, utilizes gas of less than 293,000 kWh a year, and it has less than 10 employees. The good news is that you are not restricted by rigid and short timeframes when you decide to find a new energy supplier.

Before there were these changes, business owners that desired to switch to better energy deals had to do it within a specified period, called a switching window. This timeframe was defined by the energy supplier. Therefore, a business owner has to use this window to arrange a new electricity or gas contract that they wanted to switch to after the expiry of their current energy deal.

The problem with this window period was that it usually varied between energy suppliers, meaning there was no consistency, and they typically lasted between 60 and 120 days. Worse still, different energy suppliers could open their switching windows at different points in the existing energy contract.

Therefore, if a micro business missed this period, the energy supplier rolled the contract into a more expensive one, which could last at least 12 months. Simply put, missing the switching window was costly to many micro businesses.

Now, if you run a business that fails to meet the micro business requirements, and is categorized as a large business or SME, then these new switching rules don’t apply. Instead, you still need to follow the switching window rules.

Switching a micro business energy supplier

Therefore, if you have a micro business and intend to switch energy suppliers, it’s a good idea to contact an energy broker a few months before the expiry of your current energy contract.

In most cases, you can start comparing energy quotes once your current energy supplier contacts you with an energy renewal offer. This can help your energy broker to compare energy prices and give you an accurate quote.