How to find the best electricity price

Utility Commission called power to choose org that's the website that we'll be using today but if you' re outside of Texas there's still different options so you can look at websites such as electric choice com that will offer similar plan options but it will be for a variety of different states all right so we've gone to power to choose org and the first thing that it's asking us to enter in our zip code so we're a put in the zip code here and it gives us two different options we're go with the one that says narrow your search and it's going to ask us three question sit I'll help to narrow down the options and you'll see here the first one is 

how much electricity do you use in a month this is probably the single most important thing to picking the right plan so this will get us in the ball park we're going to go with a thousand to 2,000 kilowatt hours for now and you'll see how important this is before the end of this video the second question is what type of plan are you interested in as far as the different rate structures and we're go nna go here with a fixed rate now some of these other ones would be variable would mean that they change with the market you'll see that there's variable components to how they structure the rates but fixed means that it's going to be fixed pricing for the term the contract it's not going to change as market pricing changes the third question that it's asking us is how long do we want our contract to last our typical recommendation would be 12 months or a year you can go shorter so if you can go down to three months or maybe six months or you can go longer up to maybe 36 months what you'll find is that the shorter term contracts are often lower price this means because they are geared more toward seasonality so for example if you do a six-month contract here in the fall as you're heading into winter the winter Compare electricity prices are normally lower especially somewhere like Texas and that means that it may be lower for the six months of the contract but when you come up the next summer and you extend it then it's going to be higher pricing anyway so the twelve months kind of averages that out now if you go with a 36 month contract let's say what's going to happen is you're gonna have a higher price through the whole period because you're more protected against any market price increases as you go out further one other thing to think about here is the impact of termination fees most of these contracts will have a termination fee if 

you read the fine print typically they won't charge you for that if you are just relocating or moving but if you cancel it for some other reason Then you would have that penalty so you may want to stay with the shorter term contracts like a year two to reduce some of that risk of having to cancel the contract we're getting a note here about minimum electricity usage there are minimum charges that you'll often find regardless of how much electricity you use we're going to look at that in more detail