Crazy gas meter readings. Plan of attack?

spokeydokey · 17 October 2009 at 1:01AM

Hell all,

I'm looking for a bit of advice on how to broach the subject of a crazy gas bill with my gas company and possibly Landlord.

I live in a one bedroom rented flat and have recently had a gas bill that's far larger than I expect. I'm quite bad at the switching and frenetically sending meter readings off but I know something is awry here.

My previous quarterly bills were £31, £56, £41. You get the idea. These come from a combination of actual and estimated readings. I just received one for £228 and was, needless to say, a bit surprised.

At first I thought they were just being cheeky with their estimate (I've heard stories of them sending crazy bills sometimes) and went off to read the meter but I now discover that their estimate is low. I think something must have gone wrong.

The cost of bills is all a bit deceptive so I'll just talk about actual meter readings.

In the first year I was in the property, March 08 - March 09 my meter went from 1342 to 1670, 328 units (actual readings).

Since then, they estimated me to have hit 1719 at the end of June 09, and a whopping 2286 at the end of September. To my horror I'm now actually at 2345. Thats 675 units since my last meter reading six months ago compared to 328 over a whole year! Is it just a coincidence that both the real and estimated jumped so massively at the same time? (I have a bill that actually says here "Your usage was 68.8kWh/day over this period compared to 2.71kWh over the same period last year").

I haven't had the heating on for well over six months and my cooker is electric so this is just from hot water. Can this really be right? The landlord sent a chap out to check the boiler, meter etc in August and he didn't flag anything up.

My question really is how should I go about trying to sort this out? If something is discovered to be wrong with the system who is responsible? My fear is that I'm going to find it very hard to argue with meter readings despite the obvious jump on my normal consumption.

I've now turned off the boiler and will check in the morning to see if gas has magically been used overnight. It already seems to have been ticking up during the course of the evening despite the heating being off and no taps having been run.

Any advice would be immensely appreciated and apologies for the length of my post.

Thanks,

Spokey

Methusela · 17 October 2009 at 2:10AM

Hi spokeydokey,
A few comments to start with:
First, check your meter to see whether it is marked cubic metres or cubic feet ( the meter will have either m3 or ft3 somewhere on the front of it). Then check your bills to make sure you are not being charged for the wrong units. Some people have paid seriously over the odds because their supplier was charging them for the wrong units. There's a big difference between using one cubic foot and one cubic metre.

Your idea of shutting off the gas is good. Meters can occasionally be faulty and there have been occasions where two flats ended up running on the same meter, so shout if the meter shows gas has been used, when you know you haven't used any.

You also need to be sure that the start reading you had was correct. Did you check the reading yourself when you moved in? It's worth checking the meter yourself every time you get an estimated bill, to see if they got it roughly right and if they didn't, phone them with a correct reading to make sure you don't get too far out of step from reality. If you do it will catch up with you sooner or later.Your earlier bills of £31, £41 and £56 per QUARTER look very low indeed. I usually budget for an average of around £70 per MONTH for gas, so it may simply be that your supplier started with an actual reading and then put in some very low estimates for the first few quarters. This would leave it looking as though your consumption had shot up when it hadn't.

To give you a rough comparison of your usage, I live in a 3bed house and my average daily consumption is 68kWhr.(much higher in winter, lower in summer of course) This is pretty much the same as your higher figure.Your lower figure of 2.71kWhr for the previous year looks very suspicious because you'd use more than this keeping the pilot lights going. If you've only been in the place just over a year, this previous figure might go back to when the flat was empty.

The other thing to check is how much you are paying per kWhr for your gas. If you check Martin's website you can pick up some good advice on how to move to a cheaper supplier (although you'll still have to pay the bills you already have before you switch).

I'm off to bed now but if you need any more advice, just ask and I'll be back on tomorrow.

spokeydokey · 19 October 2009 at 7:57PM

Thanks very much for the advice.

After doing some monitoring of my usage over the weekend and having a long call with Southern Electric, I've finally got to the bottom of the issue. Thought I'd post quickly as something a bit weird happened that someone might be mildly interested in.

They massively underestimated my winter bill despite me having had an engineer out to take a reading. They described it as an 'online entry error' (or something similar) where they say even though the guy took a reading, he punched it into his machine incorrectly and so I got an estimate instead.

The bad thing is that (apparently this is standard procedure) when they make an estimate despite an engineer having visited like this they enter it on your bill as an ACTUAL reading. I had an engineer visit, he took a reading and then I received a bill that claimed to be based on actual usage. It was actually estimated.

On top of this, I had an engineer out again in June that would have flagged up the error but what he took was apparently a 'non-billable' reading and so they didn't mention it in my July or October bills.

I guess what I've learnt is not to trust the person who comes round and checks the meter. The only way to know if you're being billed correctly is to check yourself. I probably could have guessed that though...

Thanks again,

Spokeydokey

PS: My actual usage averaged over the year is ~25kWh/day. Makes a lot more sense alongside your 68 now.