EDF Fail Ofgem Direct Debit Rules

schrodie wrote: »

If you receive one of these DD reviews and EDF have increased your DD can you tell EDF that you're not prepared to accept the increase?

If you can argue a different figure (or the previous figure) is accurate, or the new figure is not accurate then normally it is not difficult to get the adviser to reinstate the previous figure.

Post some numbers for further advice.

Guyz
I wonder if I can get some advice, very briefly I work out of the country, and Im separated from my wife & family, I pay all my bills by DD. on the same day each month along with an amount each month for my family to live off.

Now I was with EDF until recently, and i have just switched to EOn, upon leaving EDf have sent me a final energy bill of a massive £621. I am frantic, I have looked back and instead of the agreed DD amount of £158 per month, they have only been taking £49.00, I have been recording my calls with them, and one of there advisers stated that it looks like someone in there department has been altering the DD every month down form £158 to £49.

I have just spoken to a team leader who offered £50 goodwill, I told him that if they had done there jobs correctly, and taken the agreed amount every month I would be due a refund not a huge bill.

Now I know the wife should have noticed the extra £100 but its not up to her to ask whys its in the account she just spends all that I give her.

Where do i stand legally he said it was my legal responsibility to check, I said it was there responsibility to take the agreed amount and if it was to differ they should Inform me within 10 days of any different amounts to be taken ?

Any advice gratefully received

Al

Jalexa, something to consider is the data received from the Data Collector as this can have a bad and often false impact if the supplier is not careful. Here are some sources:

- when you switch, the new Data Collector for the new supplier gets a previous 12 month consumption data item.
- every time they take reading from site, it may or not be validated. If validated, they provide an Annualised Advance which is basically the difference between the last 2 firm readings, but has some smoothing parameters added hence it can be slightly out.
- whenever a reading is validated via the Data Collector, it causes them to trigger a data flow to the supplier with above Annualised Advance plus an Estimated Annual Advance.
- any event causing a reading to be taken, causes the above 2 processes to take place.
. Agents perform frequent rollbacks and recalculations due to data errors which trigger the above.
- there are "special cause variation" issues (or individual style root causes if you're not in the improvement game) which can produce negative values which can be massive or ridiculously high positive values. By ridiculous positive I mean values like 1000kwh per day and more style values.

All of this tends to get used as well as just your readings. Now, the last point about oddities can cause huge bills or DD's very easily if a supplier isnt careful.

Every month Elexon send out a report of these values as they are market damaging and they have been heavily monitored for some years.

Something to consider is that for years Elexon have been saying this is just the tip of the iceberg and whilst not a fully compliant measure, advised suppliers to look below their very high tolerence reports.

These areas are highly specialised and my experience of consultants is that they don't understand it...so use them and possibly the system won't fully understand them either.

If their new SAP system isnt careful, it could use poor data like this.

Reading Terrylw 1's latest post has given me brain freeze - I can just imagine what nonsensical algorithms a software designer could think up!!!...and getting them to run on a Commodore 64 ??