In this note we investigate the effects of perturbations in a dark energy component with a constant equation of state on large scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies . The inclusion of perturbations increases the large scale power . We investigate more speculative dark energy models with w < -1 and find the opposite behaviour . Overall the inclusion of perturbations in the dark energy component increases the degeneracies . We generalise the parameterization of the dark energy fluctuations to allow for an arbitrary constant sound speeds and show how constraints from cosmic microwave background experiments change if this is included . Combining cosmic microwave background with large scale structure , Hubble parameter and Supernovae observations we obtain w = -1.02 \pm 0.16 ( 1 \sigma ) as a constraint on the equation of state , which is almost independent of the sound speed chosen . With the presented analysis we find no significant constraint on the constant speed of sound of the dark energy component .