British Gas wrong electricity Reading - Please Help

carallen

In March 2006 we agreed to Price Protection with our gas and electricity with British Gas.

Regarding our electricity we have paid pretty much the same per month but once or twice have noticed that British gas have reduced our direct debit in our Bank, we telephoned to advise them that we did not want to do this because we did not want to end up owing them money, they agreed to set our payments at a level which they thought would be OK for our usage.

They ALWAYS came and read our meters, we checked and the readings were correct.

Now the messy bit! After telephoning to ask (after receiving a letter from them) about the new price protection plan coming up, they advise that they think it could be possibly that our meter readings have been read the wrong way round BY THEM e.g., night readings have been read as day readings and day readings have been read as night readings (and charged appropriately), they also informed us that they had sent out meter readers especially over the last 4 years because of our meter readings, but not one of these meter reading had been taken further.

We wish to know where we would stand on this situation, as how were we supposed to realise that the meter is actually reading the readings the wrong way round. We have Rate 1 and Rate 2, on our meter but how would we know which was day and which was night.

We now have to take readings for a couple of days over a 24 hour period and let them know when they call us up, but we are so worried they are gonna say we own them horrendous amounts of money. Which yes we may do, but then it was not our fault they were reading the meters incorrectly??

Please could somebody offer advice as to how we can resolve this situation.

dogshome

Hi carallen - The first line of your post refers to "Gas & Electricity with Brit. Gas", then you go on to refer to your E7 meter.
From that it would seem that your home was built with E7 heating, then later upgraded to Gas CH - If in fact you do have Gas CH and Hot water, you are on the wrong Elec tariff and should have a standard meter.

E7 heating offers cheap overnight power to heat Hot water & Storage radiators, but, the power you use during the day is up to 50% dearer for Prime units and 11% dearer for Secondary units than a Standard meter.
.
With a fully operational E7 system, the Night use is always a lot more than the Day use, but it seems that no one told BG the heating had been changed, so from your readings they have assumed that the higher of the two readings is the Night Rate, when in fact because you are not using Storage radiators, the higher reading is what you have been using during the day.

If my assumption is correct and you are not using storage radiators and/or cooking up hot water overnight, get on to BG today to advise them of your set-up. They will either change the E7 meter for a Standard one, or add the two readings together and charge them at standard rate If they want to charge you for the meter change, then switch to a supplier who will do it for free.

When the meter change has been done, use the Switch sites to look for the best tariff for your consumption
Good Luck

carallen

Dear Dogshom

First of all thank you for taking the time to reply. I wish people at BG were like yourself!!

We have lived in this house since 1995, and cannot ever recall telling BG that we had night storage heaters as we have never had them, our heating and shower are all run on gas.

We do have a hot water tank in an airing cupboard, mainly because we did not want to get rid of the airing cupboard for storage uses etc..

I really don't understand all the details regarding gas and electricity, but all I know is that when I spoke to the man the other day he said "you are on economy 7 heating", which I replied "I don't know am I?, he abruptly said "Yes you are".

I have now taken meter readings and photographs of the meter, but cannot understand why we have ever been put on an economy 7 heating system.

I am petrified we are gonna owe them money, and have visions of debt collectors turning up at the door - we have never ever been in debt to BG in all our time of living in a house.

Once again may I take the time to say thank you for your advice, I will now go to British gas with a bit more knowledge.

mattcanary

It is extremely likely that at some point in the distant past your home would have had storage heaters. When the heating was changed over to gas, the bill payer at that time probably never contacted BGas to ask them to change off the E7 tariff. Therefore billing has stayed on that tariff ever since.
There is no default tariff (single rate, E7 or E10) when someone moves in to an address. They just continue on the same tariff as existed before. Up to the billpayer to notice unfortunately.

Having said this, the prices should have been billed the right way round. That is not necessarily the fault of the meter man. Certainly the hand-held machines I used as a meter-reader did not routinely label each reading you were required to enter with day or night. In adddition, we were not informed of the previous readings - so it was is impossible to always know for sure which is which! Basically, the machine would ask you to check if the readings you had just entered were correct if the machine thought they looked wrong (based upon previous readings, etc). If this happened, we would enter the readings again the other way round and if this worked would proceed on that basis. Of course, if they had always been the wrong way round on the computer system, this would not solve the problem - it would just make the problem even worse.
However, the meter-man can only make an assumption that he has entered the readings in the correct way round the second time, he can't know for sure as he soes not have any information available to him.

I agree this is a ridiculous situation but I thought I would shed some light on how it works!

Premier_2

carallen wrote: »

...They ALWAYS came and read our meters, we checked and the readings were correct.

... they advise that they think it could be possibly that our meter readings have been read the wrong way round BY THEM

... and so presumably by you too.

carallen wrote: »

... how were we supposed to realise that the meter is actually reading the readings the wrong way round. We have Rate 1 and Rate 2, on our meter but how would we know which was day and which was night...

Unless there is no obvious way, you are probably in a better position than a meter reader to tell.

On some meters it is obvious. e.g. there is a marker pointing to the rate currently in use. Other meters have different ways but admittedly with some meters there doesn't appear to be any easy way to immediately identify which rate you are currently on.

Simple way to identify which rate you are currently on is to take meter readings, then go and boil a kettle and see which rate has changed - that is the rate you are currently on and so the other is presumably the night rate. You can of course double check this by doing the same exercise during the off peak period.

Note that if your meter doesn't show fractions of a unit, you may need to boil the kettle about 3-5 times using cold water each time to see which registry records a unit.

Premier_2

carallen wrote: »

...I have now taken meter readings and photographs of the meter, but cannot understand why we have ever been put on an economy 7 heating system...

You are on economy 7 because someone at some time asked for that (perhaps the builder when the house was originally built). That is why you have a dual rate meter.

Dual rate meters cost more than single rate meters (you don't pay this directly, but the supplier does). Some suppliers will only supply you with dual rate if you have a dual rate meter (as it means they recover the cost through the tariff), but BG allow a single rate tariff even with a dual rate meter (presumably they have decided the cost of replacement is more than the loss incurred due to the single rate tariff)

You don't need storage heaters to have E7. I have E7 and don't have storage heaters or an electric immersion heater (and the property never has had!). E7 provides 7 hours of cheap rate electricity every night (typically less than 1/2 price per unit) but does often incur a small premium (about 10%) over single rate during the day time. The break even point is typically about 25% but does vary by supplier/tariff. It's interesting to note that 7/24 = 29% though of course you might expect to use more electricity during the day unless you change your habits to make maximum benefit of the cheap rate i.e. by using timers on things like the immersion heater, washing machine, dishwasher, etc

Btw, if you are not taking the benefit of cheap rate electricity, you'd probably be better off heating your hot water by gas than using the immersion heater ... you can still have a hot water tank and so an airing cupboard, just the water is heated by a gas boiler.

carallen

An-Up-date from British Gas!

To cut a long story short basically we had our meter changed in 2005 and at this time we think that the meter has been installed or set up incorrectly (as in wired up wrongly??) on mentioning our problem to our neighbours we checked their meter's and their statements and they are the same as us, up until the new meters were installed we were paying the correct charges and when the new meters were installed this is when the problems began there are three houses in our Street running next to each other and all had new meters put in about the same time and all of them have had their electricity charged the wrong way round e.g., day for night and night for day. Does this still make us liable??

Cardew

Yes you are technically liable as you are responsible for checking your account.

There might be a case also under the Billing code where you can only be back-billed for 12 months where BG are at fault - and clearly they(and you) have been at fault.

That said BG are pretty good at 'goodwill' payments and I would not be surprised if they don't write off any loss.