Editha

I've also had bad experiences with BT and Scottish Power, both of which are notorious. Scottish Power accounts for a whole day of the week I've spent on the phone to call-centres in the last year. BT are still sending me demands to send them back equipment I never had in the first place and I've given up trying to get their records amended.

not2old

Based on 'customer service' as well as 'cost & quality of service', have you found or can recommend better providers than BT & Scottish Power?

Editha

I switched from Scottish Power to E.On because they were cheaper, but they weren't much more efficient;it took several weeks longer than it should have done, and several phone calls, to set up our account. Then when we got solar panels, it became infuriatingly difficult to set up our FIT (feed in tariff) with E.On. The 14 page form had to be downloaded, filled in by hand, signed and then scanned and returned to them by email attachment. As if that wasn't bad enough, their email system returned every email that had more than one page of the form attached to it, so to get the form to them, I had to send 14 emails. That took a day of my life and I was so pissed off I made a formal complaint and asked for financial compensation. I managed to screw a fiver out of them, but that was probably the most poorly paid day's work of my life. But, if I hadn't emailed them the form in instalments, they told me a postal application would take six weeks to process, which would have meant six weeks lost FIT payments.

We've recently switched to Green Energy, partly because they are ....well....green, but mainly because they offer a tariff with no service charges, which works best with our solar panels. They are a small company which may be why switching to them has been as easy as pie. It's early days, but so far I have no complaints.

If you are choosing an electricity company in the UK, the best thing to do is use one of the comparison sites such as guardianenergycomparison.co.uk

I haven't switched from BT for our phone and broadband. That's partly because I like using BT hi-fi hotspots when I'm travelling in the UK. I don't use a smartphone, so the free BT wifi enables me to check email.

There are comparison sites for phone and broadband, but they only show the latest introductory offers, which only apply for a few months. So it's really difficult to work out which will be cheapest in the long term. And, every time you switch you've got to install new modems. So, I've decided to stick with the devil I know for the time being.

Editha

The really wet bit of Devon is the centre, particularly round Okehampton, one reason property is cheaper there. I'm not sure what you mean by east and west coast, I think of it as north and south. The coastal regions get less rain. The south coast is pricier than the north, mainly because of better transport links and it also has better summers, but the north coast has milder winters because of the gulf stream.

There probably are more tourists on the south coast, but here in the north we certainly get our share. People told us we'd get fed up with traffic jams in the summer; actually we haven't experienced any.

You should find what you want without too much difficulty. Best of luck with your search!

Pistolpete2

We were originally considering the area near Exeter for access to college there and therefore headed there when we arrived last August.

However, we ended up here in Weymouth for better sailing facilities (so we thought - even here actual access is not that easy) and, as perceived, slightly better all-round weather (which actually seems to be correct).

I have some thoughts on Devon (that is South Devon) which I would like to share - I'll PM you rather than boost interest in specific smallish spots to their probable overall detriment.

One thing that we did discover was that though there are areas around the River Exe (Honiton area in particular) that suffer excess rainfall and heavy flooding, being in the 'shadow' of Dartmoor, there are micro-climate areas that mean far less rainfall and flooding than somewhere only a few miles up-river/estuary.

Sitting where we are, sticking out in the Channel with Portland, we can often see the rainfall on the uplands just 'behind' us between here and Dorchester while we are still bathed in sunshine. However, we can in extreme circumstances get flooding here due to the heavy rainfall trying to get out on the River Wey from those upland areas.