1 in 10 people admit to suffering from the ‘Fear of Running Out’ of battery

According to new research by energy auto-switching service weflip, the fear of your battery running out on your rechargeable devices, ‘FoRO’, affects more than 1 in 10 (11%) UK adults.

The creators of the ‘sign up once, save forever’ service asked over 2,000 UK adults to reveal their fears and found that as many people had a fear of running out of energy as were afraid of mice, and that it affected more people than a fear of the dark, a fear of thunder and lightning or the fear of missing out (FoMO). In fact, FoRO affected nearly as many people as the fear of flying (15%) and the fear of injections (15%).

Over 1 in 5 (22%) of UK adults admitted to feeling anxious when they were running out of battery and 13% said they couldn’t leave the house if their device isn’t charged. 19% agreed that they were addicted to their device and needed to keep them charged.

UK adults’ fears and phobias

Amanda Cumine from weflip commented, “We’ve probably all experienced those knots in our stomach when our mobile battery drops into the red, but for some people the fear of running out (FoRO) has become a very real worry causing them stress and anxiety. Many won’t leave the house if their mobile device isn’t charged.

“Unfortunately, we can’t remove the fear of your mobile battery running out of charge, but we can protect you from ever receiving a terrifying energy bill again. By signing up to weflip you’ll forever stay on cheaper energy deals as we automatically switch you to tariffs that will keep more money in your pocket without you ever having to worry about comparing and switching your energy provider again.

“Fortunately, most people won’t suffer serious impacts from FoRO, but it does highlight our growing dependency on energy to power our homes and devices.  As a result, it makes sense to review how you consume energy in the home and how much you are paying for it, so you can charge your devices without totting up big energy bills.  weflip is a great way to keep your energy bills down without all the hassle of constantly shopping around for the best deal yourself.”

How weflip works

Customers register their details and provide information including current supplier, tariff and energy usage – which can all be found on an existing bill.  weflip’s algorithm pinpoints the best deals and customers choose which tariff to flip to first.   After the initial switch, weflip will take over and continue to scour the market, flipping them to better deals automatically, for life (when a minimum saving of £50, including exit fees, can be made).  No further manual comparisons are needed, as weflip does all the work for you.

For more information on how to save on your energy bills for life, visit: https://www.weflip.com/

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Notes to Editors

On the 5 October 2018, Bilendi conducted an online survey among 2,002 randomly selected British adults who are Maximiles UK panelists.  The margin of error-which measures sampling variability-is +/- 2.2%. The results have been statistically weighted according to the most current education, age, gender and regional data to ensure samples representative of the entire adult population of United Kingdom. Discrepancies in or between totals are due to rounding.

For further information, please contact

Anders Nilsson, Martyn John and Louisa Marsden on media@weflip.com

Gordon, Jason or Liz at MAW Communications on 01603 505 845

About weflip

weflip is a smart savings service that helps people save money by automatically switching them to better energy deals.

weflip is a completely free, automatic savings service that guarantees cheap energy forever.  After customers sign up, weflip simply flips households onto cheap energy tariffs automatically, doing all the hard work on their behalf, so they never have to worry about overspending on energy ever again.

weflip is part of GoCompare.com Group plc, which operates GoCompare, one of the UK’s largest and most trusted comparison sites and has been saving customers money on a range of financial and non-financial products since 2006.

weflip’s energy service is powered by Energylinx, which is also a GoCompare Group plc company, and one of the UK’s most established and respected energy comparison services.

weflip takes customer privacy seriously and does not sell customer data.

For more information visit www.weflip.com and www.gocomparegroup.com.