Problem with electric company

lupin84

My boyfriend and I moved house last week. It's our first home together and it's all a bit daunting. It's a rented property and we spent the first afternoon setting up all the utilities. We had a letter from a company called Spark and we presumed we needed to set up with them. Entirely our mistake. However when we called British Gas to find our who are gas is with they told us our electric was in dispute and Eon had taken control the day before but spark were laying claim to it. We phoned Eon and they told us that Spark have no right to it and we should ring up and cancel with them and tell them to check the national database. We did that however Spark told us we owe them for the time we were with them (as my boyfriend told them, it had been 2 hours and we'd used no electric in that time). They also said it could take up to 4 weeks to cancel. Today they have set up a DD and I don't know what we can do. Can we cancel the DD? Will we get in trouble? Can this company really take any money from us? Please help we have no idea what to do next.

Cardew

When you move in you have entered a legally binding 'deemed contract' with whoever is supplying the house.

You can immediately apply to switch the supply to a new company, which takes 6-8 weeks to process.

Obviously you need to sort out just who is supplying the house and you will have to pay for the electricity used until the company of your choice takes over the supply.

You can cancel the DD to Spark.

One tip - put everything in writing, an email will suffice.

lupin84

Well we were quite happy to go with whoever the landlord had suggested just for ease and when speaking to British Gas (they were the ones who told us about the dispute) they said that Eon had taken over the supply on the 26th and Spark had no claim to it and should not have led us to believe otherwise. So it was entirely our error phoning them in the first place but we had a letter from them so presumed they were our suppliers.

Thank you. I've written up an e-mail to their complaints department outlining the issue and I shall cancel the direct debit at lunch. My boyfriend is going to try calling them again over his lunch hour but when he tried yesterday he sat in a queue for 30 minutes.

Our only concern at this point (and we don't know if this is even possible) is that we might get billed by two companies for one month's electric.

Honestly moving was stressful enough without this too! I'm just annoyed we made the phonecall in the first place, we just didn't know any better. Thanks for the speedy reply.