A Mijas Reader Was Quietly Paying an Extra €300 a Year on One Bill

On Monday, we introduced the WaypointSur electricity contract check, a free one-minute reading of your factura de la luz — electricity bill that answers a single question: is your contract overcharging you? It earns us nothing either way, which was the point. We asked you to run your latest bill through it, or to reply with the bill attached if you would rather have a person look at it.

You did both. Readers ran the check more than two dozen times in its first week, and most of you used the anonymous option. That choice told us something on its own. Years of "free" bill checkers that were really sales funnels have trained everyone to keep their name out of it. Fair enough.

Of the bills the machine could fully read, it told three households to stay put, told one to strike a single add-on line, and sent the rest to a human for review before anyone touched anything. It recommended a switch to nobody.

Every reader who left an email address got a human reply this week, and every bill that arrived by email was read and answered the same day. Two of those reviews ended with the verdict people least expect from anything free: your contract is good, keep it. One went to a household inland from the Costa whose June bill worked out at €0.148 per kWh on an indexed contract, while fixed offers on the market run €0.14 to €0.18. Confirmed July 2026. They already run the heavy appliances when the hourly price dips. We told them to change nothing and enjoy the pool.

One review went the other way. A reader in Mijas is paying a flat rate of just under €0.20 per kWh, while their own meter shows more than half their usage falling in the cheapest hours of the day. On top of that sits an add-on service called Pack Iberdrola at €8.65 a month plus IVA. And the bill carries the two best words in Spanish utilities, sin permanencia — no lock-in clause, so they are free to change any of it at no cost.

Removing the add-on and repricing the rate is worth roughly €250 to €340 a year. Step one is a phone call to Iberdrola (900 322 044, or in person at their customer office at Plaza de la Hispanidad 1 in Fuengirola). If it comes to a full switch, the change takes 15 to 21 days and lands before the August bills. The wires, the meter, and the crew who come when the lights go out never change.

One household, found in week one, quietly paying an extra €300 a year for the privilege of never having looked. That bill is why the instrument exists.

Every electricity checker you have met before had a stake in your answer. When the verdict and the commission come from the same place, "you should switch" is the only answer the machine can afford to give, and capable people learned to stop asking.

So an instrument that mostly says "you are fine" sounds like a failure. Look again. That is the one answer no commission-funded checker has ever produced. The savings are real when they exist, but the stay-put verdicts are the product. They make it safe to ask the question once a year instead of never.

Week one also showed us the gaps. Some bill layouts caused the PDF reader to fail, and one reader described doing everything right yet still landing on an empty form. They were right, we said so, and their bill got read by a person the same day, while the machine gets taught that layout this week. If yours is unreadable, reply to this email with the bill attached, and we will process it by hand.

Run yours this weekend: the contract check takes a minute, reads the PDF in your browser, and sends us nothing unless you confirm. If you want to understand every line first, our explainer walks through them: Spain electricity bill, explained.