npower and economy 7

helloiamsteph

Hi all,

I'm in a bit of a flap but will try to keep this as simple as possible.

My partner and I moved into a rented 1 bedroom flat on the 31st January this year - we have 2 storage heaters and no gas.

I arranged with npower to pay £40 a month by direct debit, but the call handler couldn't tell me what my estimated bills would be. Me being a little silly, I completely forgot to ask them again further down the line.

Our latest statement has shown that we owe £450. I think this is pretty ridiculous, given that we have already paid them £120 and we are very concious about using energy and make sure everything is turned off at the plug, including the oven and washing machine when not in use.

The funny thing is, our day time consumption has been shown to be higher than our night time consumption, which is insane as we both work all day and leave nothing switched on.

We are both just recovering from redundancy and cannot afford to pay this bill. I gave npower new meter readings and they were very dismissive of my concerns. Their energy efficiency 'helpline' were the same, and basically told us to stay on e7, even though it is crippling us financially.

The flat is rented so we can't change any of the fittings. Has anyone any thoughts on this one? Does the bill seem wrong? Is there any way I can get around this?

Thanks.

hughesapc

sounds like you need to check your timer settings on the Eco 7 meter to see they only run between the cheap times - 00.00 - 7am check

jonesy76

Hello all,

i work for npower, so i may be able to help with certain electricity problems.

I think the main culprit here is transposition of reads. normally day is used more than night as it is on for longer, but in these circumstances usage will buck the trend and night will be more than day.

npower have seen this and thought 'this must be wrong' and switched the reads around. Double check the reads against the bill and meter.

I have seen this many times before..

Be_Happy

Hi

One or two points to pick up on. If you moved into the flat in January and are paying £40 per month, would you not have paid around £280 to date?

Secondly, during the summer if you are not using your storage heaters, the day use can easily be higher than the night use. It all depends when you have your imersion heater on. This is the biggest user of power during the summer - are you sure it is only on during the night. Even boosting it for an hour during the day would use 3 units.

Are you using any other electric heating during the day?

£40 per month is way too low for all electric heating. Your total bill so far could easily be correct depending on your heat settings.

helloiamsteph

Hi Be Happy,

Sorry, I should have mentioned that our first direct debit came out in April, we had a few problems with npower not setting out direct debit up and then had some family issues which delayed it even further.

I turn our boiler off when we don't need it and our shower produces it's own hot water and is turned off after.

No other electric heating used

Ignite

Hi,

We had problems with nPower in respect to economy 7. When we got our first bill, they had the rates the wrong way round and tried to charge us double what it should have been. What we did was to call them and they asked for a set of readings. They asked us to then call up a couple of hours later and give them another set of readings. From this, they could work out which rate was which.

Depending on what meter you have, it should show you on the screen something like "rate now" for the rate in use. Check this out for your own peace of mind and compare this to your meter readings on your bill.

I hope this helps