Stunned

sapmac

Just got letter from E-ON. I am £67 in credit and they want £210 a month, up from £140!. Sheer lunacy.

KimYeovil

On direct debit accounts with Eon to receive your 18 to 21% discount you are expected to pay for fuel in advance. Their zero point is the end of March.

You are only £67 in credit in December? Please think before embarassingly accusing others of lunacy. If you've been continually paying £140 per month over summer and still have not built up a larger buffer than that then you were clearly not paying enough. Provide some evidence that £210 is too much before continuing to protest.

You are only paying an extra £35 to cover arrears of underpayments and £35 to cover ongoing payments. Come the zero point in March/April your payment should come back down by £35 so the monthly payment next year should be £175 odd. If you don't like paying £175 per month then use less fuel. Or forgo the 21% discount and switch to quarterly billing. (Figures in this last paragraph are for illustrative purposes only. Actual breakdown will be different.)

[Deleted User]

We pay £66 per month and have done since june 2009. At this moment we are £210 in credit ie 3 months dd payments. The worst months of the winter are still to come

£67 credit, op, only gives you a safety net of half of one months dd.

E.ON_Company_Representative

Hi sapmac,

The information given by Kim and kittie is accurate. The Direct Debit will have been reviewed on production of your latest bill and increased to ensure that a zero balance is reached at spring review time.

£67 credit is low for this time of year and you can usually expect your main winter bill to be much higher than the bills throughout the rest of the year.

When the Direct Debit is reviewed again in the spring it will be amended to reflect your annual usage over the next 12 months, the previous years usage will be used to forecast this figure.

Brian

mrcow

Eon tried to do this to us a year ago (November 2008). We were paying £140 per month and tried to increase our dd to £180.

I called them up and told them to go pee up a rope. There was no way that that was an accurate forecast of my useage and there was no way that my bill was going to be increase to that. After about 10 minutes (of listening to the verbatim script being droned onto me), the customer services rep finally agreed not to increase it. I told her if I owed any money by April/May, then I'd pay it.

Lo and behold - of course I didn't owe them any money. They owed me. In fact it's now December and they now owe me in excess of £400. If they had done as they had proposed, they would have owed me over £800 by now!

Sometimes they just can't get it right. They see what a computer screen says and are unable to apply any brains to the situation.

uptomyeyeballs

KimYeovil wrote: »

On direct debit accounts with Eon to receive your 18 to 21% discount you are expected to pay for fuel in advance.

Nice caveat. Is this common to other suppliers?

Dave_save

I'm with EDF, and switched to them in October. My DD was set at a level which would presumably mean I'd be at zero debit at the aniversary. Consequently my low DD isn't enough to cover the first winter use and my gas account is in debit to the tune of £35. I've no doubt EDF will at some point during the year want to recover the debit amount and increase the DD which will mean they will have an excess come next October.

david39

In my opinion, energy companies are showing a large reduction in revenue because of reduced demand from their commercial and industrial customers during the recession.

As a result, they increase the monthly DDs of their domestic customers over and above what is necessary in order to temporarily offset this loss of income.

At the end of the settlement period, when they have to repay the money or reduce the domestic DDs, then they hope that demand, and so revenue, will be on the rise again from the commercial market.

They are just taking an interest-free loan from us to minimise the effect of the recession on their annual revenue figures.

tanith

£67 is no where near enough of a buffer as others have said , we have built up £300 which by previous years consumption is probably going to be just about right come the early Summer... I have peace of mind knowing that money is already 'banked' as it were and I don't worry when on days like today I keep the heating on 15* all day as I am not chancing going outside on what looks like a skating rink..

mrcow

tanith wrote: »

£67 is no where near enough of a buffer as others have said

In your opinion.

I've just checked my eon online account history.

Last December - I had a £97 credit.

My March, it was £55

By May it was £3

There are five of us in my house (4 bedroom detached with 3 reception rooms and a large kitchen). We have a 30 year old boiler and I don't like the cold.

As I said - they wanted to increase my dd to £180 (from £140) back in the Novermber.

It was completely ridiculous - and unnecessary. As time has proved.

KimYeovil

uptomyeyeballs wrote: »

Nice caveat. Is this common to other suppliers?

It's common to most direct debit tariffs with most suppliers.