british gas problems

jezzebell

Hi all.

we moved into our new house on 18th december 2005. i gave BG a meter reading of 01184 on 3/01/06 and set payments at £40 p/m i decided in april to change to powergen and gave them a final reading of 02751.

I have just recently had our final bill from BG for £320! this means our gas consumption for a 1/4 was £440!(including monthly payments made)more than double what i was paying at my old house.

i spoke to powergen as i thought our meter may be faulty and he worked out we're actually using less than average and told me how the readings are worked out (wayyyy over my head) as i mentioned that the meter seemed to be going round very quickly. he said that due to our meter being fairly old it means our units are worked out and divided by roughly 3

can anyone work out whether BG have worked out the figures wrongly?

my current reading is 03140

thank you

im scared now to put the heating on

NigeWick

jezzebell wrote:

i gave BG a meter reading

i spoke to powergen

Nigel.

Mike_by_the_Sea

Hi jezzebell

Doing a rough check on the readings, the calculation appears to be based on a cubic metres. If it was based on cubic feet, the bill would have been almost 3 times as much!

So what? The calculation of the cost of the readings seems to be in the right ballpark.

We live in a large modernish house with Gas Central Heating and hob. We have the heating on most of the time. Our annual bill would equate to about £900 using British Gas figures. So, unless you live in an old mansion, have gaps that you can put your hand through and have the heating blasting out at full pelt whilst cooking for a large family every night, it would be quite hard to spend the £400 to £450 a quarter that your readings suggest.

You can get your meter checked, but I think that it costs money if it is found to be reading ok. See link

http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/temp/ofgem/cache/cmsattach/6328_Factsheet_MeterAccuracy&BillingDisputes.pdf?wtfrom=/ofgem/work/index.jsp&section=/areasofwork/metering

For info, the "average" consumption for a 4 bed detached house is about 38,000 kWhr/yr. Your readings are suggesting a usage of nearly double that.

I hope that helps a bit.

All the best

Mike

jezzebell

hi mike thanks for that.

its an old terrace house it does have 5 bedrooms and 11 radiators 2 of which dont work. The only gas we have is the heating and fire (which is never on)

The heating was on roughly 3 hours in a morning and 4 hours at night. there is no thermostate so we have to regulate the temp by the boiler on avg i would say it was set to 1/2.

i did ask powergen about checking the meter (as they are now the provider) but they said on looking at the first reading and the second one i gave him we are using less than average so we dont think the meter is faulty.

All BG said was well you moved in in the middle of winter its bound to be high!

the house isnt overly cold and it has double glazing.

Xbigman

So you used over 1500 units of gas with BG at 25p a unit, so about £400 in just over 3 months, being the end of winter. That is not that unreasonable given you had the heating on 7 hours a day and its a bigger than normal house.

Only thing I can suggest is that you turn off all gas appliances for 24 hours and take the exact meter reading (including decimal points) before and after just to make sure nothing is turned on you don't know about or is leaking.

I think the point about metric and imperial that the BG man was trying to make was that your old address was imperial and the new one is metric, so the new one will be turning over 3 times as fast.
Regards



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