Hi everyone i hope you all had a lovely Christmas, i am new here so please go easy on me 
i would like some advice from people who actually are living in france. Were a family of 4 with two small children and just recently bought a property near quillan southern france. We plan to live here permanently once we have completed some renovation work. Apart from struggling to find an electrician who wants to do the job we are also experiencing problems with the EDF. We have decided to change the old system (huge tanks in our garden and pipes all over our walls) and use electricity only (water 
and electric heaters ) its neater and we feel whichever way we go there will still be a price to pay. I dont want to have any regrets so nothing has started yet. I know some people here use alternatives but i want to know from those using electricity their average cost? We got an email with an estimation of £200 per month which i find ridiculous as were not even living in there yet and all i simply want is to just pay what i consume yet no one has asked me for a meter reading. Is this possible in france? Our water is the same thing and i really dont want to pay estimates, i accept the price but it needs to at least be what we used. I want everything to be on demand without any of those plans. I want to use my hot water and heating when i want and turn it off when i dont want it is there such thing as this? Also to note we are fully insulating the walls loft and flooring and our house is very well built and not too old. Now another subject i want to get onto is can anyone recommend a good but reasonably priced moving company? We have had very expensive quotes. Hubby wants to just hire a van and we do it ourselves so if anyone has done this before how easy/ hard was it with customs etc? Also if anyone is local please recommend us a decent reliable electrician . Thanks in advance guys
I am sure you will get excellent advice here.
A couple of suggestions from me to get the ball rolling. There are various electricity suppliers, you do not have to use edf, and each supplier normally offers a choice of tarifs. So you can save money by carefully choosing the best tarif for your needs. You do not say how many rooms you are heating but 200€ a month or more in winter might be quite possible for a large property. France is encouraging people to move away from high electricity usage for environmental reasons, it has targets to meet.
Meter readings are no longer necessary because French properties have smart meters which are monitored remotely. Your electricity supplier knows exactly how much electricity you have used hour by hour. So you pay for your actual consumption plus of course the standing charge.
Re the removal, which country are you moving from?
I can only talk to the electricity billing and you can, of course, just pay the bill when it arrives rather than do monthly payments, as we do.
Obviously they’d prefer you to pay monthly as most overpay so the power companies have a nice bit of cash to play with over the course of the year. I don’t have direct knowledge but I think you can tell them how much you want to pay each month and then balance it off each year.
Hi and thank you for your response, we have a 120 sq house, for the moment its just our 3 bedroom house but we do have an addiditional garage with 2 rooms upstairs which we plan to convert into a 1 bed flat for tourist rentals but this is much later on. We want to put in electric wall heaters which are connected to the main fuse. I would love o change the supplier but its what the old owners used and i have no idea how to as no one speaks english and now its the holidays no one answers the phone either. Our meter is a very old one and no one has said anything to us about a smart meter. Regarding the move, its from the uk berkshire
I think you should get the meter replaced as soon as you can because very soon there will be a charge for manual meter readings. Or it may have already been introduced, I do not remember the details but it has been well publicized.
Do you have another source of heat, like a wood burner? If it’s all electric wall heating then €200 per month might not be too far from the reality.
Have you set up an online account yet? You may find it easier to do things online if you do not speak much French. Eg you can see the tarif options, switch tarifs and change your billing method in your espace client.
You are taking on quite a lot in light of you not speaking French. Have you discussed anything with anyone on the ground outside this forum?
With regards your electricity, who advised you that electric wall heaters are the way to go? And for your hot water, who has advised you? I ask because Quillan is in quite a good ‘weather area’ where solar water heating is maybe more advantageous. I certainly would not go for wall heaters over an air to air pump system - it gets pretty hot here, so some cool air is good in summer!
A decent reliable electrician? There are loads but maybe very busy. Alamo in Limoux certainly meets the criteria and can supply all the hardware. They are not cheap though if cheap is part of the criteria…
Hi @Lola89 and welcome to SF. The site owner has just released a podcast that you may well find useful https://open.spotify.com/show/6znHR98BOUDDSmFnxmEZwh
On the subject of electricity and hot water, have you considered solar?
I agree with Adam, electric water heaters may not be the way to go. Nor straight up electric water ballon. We use air source heating in gîte and have a neat air thermodynamic (air source) ballon for hot water in our house which is efficient if you have the space (it stands on the floor).
You possibly need to research a bit more and balance initial outlay against running costs.
The companies will have provided estimates based on an algorithm of what an average family of 4 use. It is easy to set up actual billing. We are with EDF as have no choice, and we pay monthly. They provide advise on how to estimate your likely bill here
Water we pay twice a year based on actual costs, and again you should be able to arrange a schedule to suit you with your water company.
Are you all British, or do you have a european nationality? As presumably you’ve researched what you need to do to move here permanently. And open a tourist lodging? This is increasingly restrictive and increasingly uneconomic because of new rules so if you have based ideas on anything in the past then think again and loom at 2025 rules.
As for moving yourself, you can do it as the customs formalities just require very detailed inventories and some patience. .
Good luck, but do learn as much French as you can now!
While you are looking at the options it might be worth considering the Tempo tarif which has 3 types of rate blue days (very low) white days (average) and 22 red days (very high but only through winter) We have a gite and Tempo is an ideal solution for it because we only rent in summer and so get lots of blue days and no red, so our bills are low, even though we have air conditioning.
I make the following comments as a recently retired electrician who worked here in France for 16 years.
Get your meter changed to a Linky (the French smart meter that is universal for all suppliers). This avoids missing readings as it’s read remotely. It also means you can have real bills every month & therefore avoid the perils of estimated bills.
Using traditional electric wall heaters is a potentially expensive way of heating a family home. Nowadays you’re better off installing a heat pump which can also contribute to water heating.
Solar PV continues to become cheaper. Even in northern France in the summer you are very likely to be able to heat your hot water for free using surplus solar capacity.
Energy use is a big subject, but the biggest/best things are to insulate, insulate & insulate.
We too have a similar sized house (126m2, 3 bedrooms) and installed electric wall heaters (replacing pre-existing rusty ones) when it was our holiday home. However just one week spent in the house in late December, relying solely on electricity for heating, led to an eye-watering bill (about €120 a few years ago, much more now probably).
As soon as we moved here permanently, we put in a wood pellet stove. Excluding about €120 for annual service, it’s about €225 a year to heat the house. We couldn’t put in a heat pump for some technical reason I can’t now recall, but that would have been our preferred option. Absolutely endorse @Badger 's advice to ensure maximum insulation.
Hi, try ringing the EDF English speaking phone number. I did this when we moved recently and was able to set up to receive bills every 2 months for actual consumption. The number is: +33 969366383.
Welcome to the forum! I agree with the others, electric wall heaters are absolutely the worst thing you could install, they are eyewateringly expensive to run! We had one in our sons room and ended up pulling it out as being a typical teenager he never turned it off!! Our living space is probably slightly bigger then yours but old and badly insulated, wevare on tempo and pay abounds 95e / month on electric (before we moved to the tempo it was around 130). We have 2 wood burners which cost 4-500e / year in wood. We have a reverse cycle aircon in our bedroom and are considering solar and heat pumps at some point. Electric prices are only going one way, no way would I ever install wall heaters!!!
If you have a Linky this can now be set to every single month.
A properly designed & controlled pure electric heating system can be OK in a well insulated home, but are never going to be as energy efficient as a heat pump.
The choice of heater is important as decent ones will have the ability to lock the controls so that people can’t fiddle with them, as well having thermal mass (cast metal or fluid). However, good quality units are a lot more expensive to buy than the horrible old simple convectors (‘grille pains’) that still seem to adorn many a French house.
Hello @Lola89 and Welcome to the forum.
Your Introduction covered a lot of info/angles.
while others talk of electricity and the like, I want to ask about your family.
You say you have 2 small children.
Have you looked into their schooling here in France?
I’ve recently moved back to Wales from Avignon. I found a company though Shipley the cheapest which is the one I chose was 1036 pound the dearest quote I received was over 6000.There name was Lenyx I recommend them
Hello, yes i have we have a school behind our garden a village school so very lucky
When I first came out to France, to assist my son with a wreck he’d inherited from his father, I used Selectra to ensure that there was a supply when we arrived and asked them to organise the fitting of a LINKY, which they did, the day after we arrived. As I recall the technician was from Enedis - he spoke English. When I moved out here two years later, the only supplier available to me without a French phone number was Planete OUI, now Mint Energie, but I’m now with EDF as they are regulated if a little more expensive. My house is 64 square metres and I’ve spent nearly €6k on insulation (this includes two faux ceilings in the bedrooms/attic and the ground floor ceiling). I also have a new insulated roof. I am STILL cold and what was the kitchen is unusable in the winter (but my house is in Mayenne, near the Normandie border where the weather is atrocious). Leroy Merlin’s website has loads of information regarding insulation (isolation in French). I also had a ballon fitted as the vendor had fitted a ridiculously tiny gas water heater that used bottled propane gas and the water was only ever lukewarm. It had a timer on it but it’s easier for me to just flip the switch on the mains rather than go down into the cellar. In hindsight I would have had a thermodynamique one as someone has suggested (again, look at Leroy Merlin’s website). I have electric radiators and not only can I not afford to run them but they are useless so instead I use cheap fan heaters. I also have a log burner but it’s hard work and I prefer an open fire. For reasons I can’t remember I can’t have a pompe a chaleur OR a pellet stove. IMO the warmest form of heating is gas central heating but it’s rightly being phased out. As for removals, I highly recommend Dapper Direct Ltd - I’ve used them both ways three times.