I felt so strongly about my experience with N-power, that I am writing a review here to dissuade anybody else signing up with them.

We joined up in the spring of 2008, and everything seemed fine until the October of that year when our daughter was born. Having a new born baby in the house and my wife being home all day meant that the heating was on 24/7. Now this as expected would push up our monthly bills, no problem I thought it will only be for a couple of months then things will go back to normal. How wrong I was. It sent us into a debit which resulted in N-power sending us a letter 2 months later stating that our bills were going up £80 extra per month. Whilst I was expecting a rise I thought that it would be about half that. When I phoned to ask if it would be possible to have any less of a rise I was flatly told no, despite explaining that my change in circumstances was only temporary. So I decided to stick with it and hoped that they knew better. Anyway in February 2009 when our Heating went back to normal usage I phoned to ask about a reduction again, to be refused again. When halfway through the summer I noticed that we were amounting a surplus of credit, and that our estimated meter readings seemed vastly inflated, this despite me entering our actual reading online, I tried phoning again, this time the women on the end of the line seemed to suggest that I was working somesort of fiddle, and that our meter reading couldn't possibly be that low! She asked me 3 times on the phone to go outside and read our gas meter. I may not be the smartest person on earth but I am quite capable of reading a row of numb ers out. I think that they must have adopted a similar position to my readings that I had posted online. She finally relented (probably picking up on my exasperation and reduced our bill back to what we were paying originaly. She would not refund our built up credit, she said incase of any shortfall in our payments (she still didn't believe me). When I finally switched suppliers last August I phoned them just to comfirm the switch. The chap that I spoke to was a breath of fresh air, who knew his stuff, he was stunned when told of my experience. He said that he would put us up as a test case so that it did not happen to someone else. He explained that there automated system takes things as an average over time and that it would have been unable to deal with such a rise in a short term. He also said that the new amount we were changed to, was exactly the amount that we were using and that we would never get our built up credit back if we stayed on it (I knew she didn't believe me). He refunded what we were owed and even said that we had made a good choice in our plan for our new supplier, EON. He did suggest some N-power plans that would work for us in the future (no hard sell just advice) and asked us not to be put off of them in the future.

If only N-power's customer service had been this good at the start, we would have stayed loyal (I only changed from my original supplier because I thought that I should, I will be sticking with my current one from now on). On the upside we ended up with our credit that we had amounted given back to us. A cheque for £500!

I am now with Eon, and at this time they seem very good indeed. Watch this space!