Help On Energy is a peer support community for people dealing with UK energy suppliers, bills, and everything that piles on top. We’re independent, ad-light, and we don’t sell switching. This page explains what we are, what we aren’t, who runs it, and why.
If you’ve ever had a problem with your energy supplier, you’ll know the feeling. The bill is wrong, or the smart meter never connected, or your direct debit jumped £90 with no explanation. You email the supplier. You wait. You call. You wait some more. You post on Facebook and within minutes you get five replies from switching agents trying to push you onto a different tariff.
That’s the landscape we sit in: a country where millions of people are stuck in supplier disputes with very little independent help, and where most of the platforms that look like they’re helping are quietly funnelling you into someone else’s commission.
Help On Energy started because that’s not good enough. People going through difficult things deserve a place that doesn’t try to sell them anything. A place where someone who’s already been through your exact problem can tell you what worked. A place that’s honest about its limits and signposts you to professional help when you need more than peer support can give.
We’re a small operation. We host the platform, we set the moderation standards, and the community does the rest.
We exist to reduce isolation and improve navigation toward appropriate support. We do not replace professional care, emergency services, financial advice, or medical diagnosis.
Real outcomes — including the failures. We’d rather show a thread where the complaint went nowhere than pretend everyone gets their refund within a week.
We don’t optimise for time-on-site or click-through. The community succeeds when someone gets a problem sorted, not when they scroll for 40 minutes.
Members post under handles, not real names. Anonymous to other members so people can share honestly. Accountable to moderation so we can keep it safe.
We’re peer support, not professionals. When someone needs medical help, debt advice, legal advice, or crisis support, we say so plainly and signpost to people who can help.
Being clear about this matters. People come to us in difficult moments — we don’t want to be misunderstood about what we can and can’t do.
The shape of what we do — and why we don’t try to do anything more.
The forum, the moderation, the safety guardrails, the accessibility, the privacy. Boring infrastructure, done properly. We pay for the hosting and we keep the lights on.
Members share what’s happened to them, what worked, what didn’t. The value is the experience — not us. We don’t pretend to be experts; the people who’ve been through it are.
When the situation needs more than peer support — debt advice, mental health support, legal questions, crisis help — we point clearly to the trusted UK services that can take it from there.
Help On Energy is run from the UK by an independent web developer who got tired of seeing people herded into switching funnels every time they asked for help. There’s no investor pressure, no growth-at-all-costs target, and no commercial relationship with any energy supplier.
The site is hosted on UK shared hosting and built with WordPress and bbPress — the same tools used by most independent forums. Modest, reliable, easy to keep transparent.
We’re upfront that we’re small. The plan is to grow carefully — adding moderators from within the community, listening to what members actually need, and resisting the temptation to add features just because the analytics suggest them. The biggest sites in this space got big by selling people things; we’d rather stay small and not.
We will never push you onto a switching deal. We will never sell your data. We will never run an advert from an energy supplier. Members never pay to use the community.
If we ever change any of this, we’ll say so loudly, on this page, before it happens.
The community is the heart of the site. Read what’s happened to people, share your own experience when you’re ready, or just lurk for a while — whatever you need.