Signing up for electricity or gas in your new flat

In order to register for electricity or gas in your new home, it is important to follow the right steps and find out which supplier and distributor offers you the best services. This post gives you some tips.

When a person moves to a new home, moving in is only the first step, as this is followed by the domiciliation of official documents, as well as the registration of utilities.

How to manage the registration of electricity in a fast way.

First of all, in order to register your electricity supply, you must know what power you need in your home. To do this, you must study the contracted power based on the following characteristics:

1. How many square metres your house is.
2. How many household appliances are connected to electricity and how many of these are labelled with the A+++ Energy Efficiency label.
3. What routines will be followed in the home. Based on this you will be able to know whether you will need a tariff with hourly discrimination or not.
4. If there are air-conditioning units connected to the grid. Based on this you should know that both air conditioning and electric heating will be a plus in your electricity supply.

Once you have taken these aspects into account, you will have to calculate the electrical power using an online power calculator, calling a technician from the company to help you with the calculation or doing it manually. The latter is not advisable as it may give an inaccurate result.

Important: Failure to correctly calculate the power will result in what is commonly known as the 'jump of leads', which occurs when more power is consumed than is contracted.

Once you know what power is correct for your home, you must contact your distributor, assigned by area, and request registration. For these, you will need to provide a number of documents:

• Personal details of the holder together with ID card and contact details.
• Postal address of home address.
• CUPS number of the supply.
• Bank account number (IBAN).
• Electrical bulletin. 

Upon submission of the documents, the company usually takes between 5 and 7 working days to register the supplies.

I've already connected the electricity, what now? 

After signing up for electricity, you should study which supplier is the most suitable for you and which one offers you the best services. Analyse which electricity and gas companies are cheapest. Currently, the most competitive tariffs available on the market are those of Naturgy tariffswith hourly discrimination and flat rates, adapted to all types of homes.

To find the tariff that best suits your needs, we recommend the use of electricity and gas comparators. This type of tool offers you up-to-date results for the electricity market. Here is one of the best ones provided by OCU.

[Article courtesy of Papernest]