under charged on utility bill

DUTR

Frodo365 wrote: »

it is not a mistake on my part and i am not trying it on.
when i switched suppliers they asked me foe my Rate 1 Reading, this is my day usage and was around 8000 units, my second rate reading is my night one and was around 1500. i know which one is which as it is on a sticker next to the meter and also on the back of the form they sent me on how to read a meter.

i switched from eon ad was paying around £75pm, Utility warehouse calculated my bill would be around 5 pounds less.
with what i owe my bill should have been around £90, when i updated the reading every few months shouldn't something have been picked up? i would have happily changed my plan then. some one said its hardly a "re mortgaging" amount of money, but you don't know my situation and £200 is a lot for someone else's mistake.

£200 is £200 but it could have been a lot worse, both the customer and the company have the responsibility to detect errors and now that it has been detected, the next plan is to get up to date :cool:

jalexa

DUTR wrote: »

In some cases though it is the consumer and their principle should be to square up their bills , in the case of the OP it would make a difference of about ,

You have glibly moved to "£17 per month for 12 months" but when the OP asked the question it was £200.

You may think "it is only £200 hardly re-mortgage rate" but to people in fuel (or any) poverty that is a lot of money to find.

It is not clear who or when any transposition error ocurred. The OP has been with the supplier for a year, but likely the meter has been registered on the system for longer. Regardless of statutory frequency of reads, normally a supplier attempts to read the meter of a new customer at least once. Was that achieved? Was an "anomally" noticed? Apparently not.

Looking for some common ground with your argument, the Billing Code applies. The customer can only get billing relief for unbilled energy supplied more than 12 months prior. However where there is an element of supplier error it is "normal" for payment terms to be offered over the same period as the error. If that still causes hardship the customer should discuss that with the supplier.

jalexa

DUTR wrote: »

both the customer and the company have the responsibility to detect errors

The customer no responsibility to detect errors not of the customer's making. It is reasonable only to check that the numbers on the bill are the numbers provided, or close to the numbers currently displayed on the meter registers.

If the identification of the meter register is not *exactly* how the bill reading is identified the customer cannot reasonably be expected to detect any error.

DUTR

jalexa wrote: »

You have glibly moved to "£17 per month for 12 months" but when the OP asked the question it was £200.

You may think "it is only £200 hardly re-mortgage rate" but to people in fuel (or any) poverty that is a lot of money to find.

It is not clear who or when any transposition error ocurred. The OP has been with the supplier for a year, but likely the meter has been registered on the system for longer. Regardless of statutory frequency of reads, normally a supplier attempts to read the meter of a new customer at least once. Was that achieved? Was an "anomally" noticed? Apparently not.

Looking for some common ground with your argument, the Billing Code applies. The customer can only get billing relief for unbilled energy supplied more than 12 months prior. However where there is an element of supplier error it is "normal" for payment terms to be offered over the same period as the error. If that still causes hardship the customer should discuss that with the supplier.

I got that from (10*£17 ) + (2*£17) =£204 near enough £200.
I agree the OP should discuss this with the supplier at the end of the day though it is the other customers that end up paying for the errors here and there if the under payment is simply waived

DUTR

jalexa wrote: »

The customer no responsibility to detect errors not of the customer's making. It is reasonable only to check that the numbers on the bill are the numbers provided, or close to the numbers currently displayed on the meter registers.

If the identification of the meter register is not *exactly* how the bill reading is identified the customer cannot reasonably be expected to detect any error.

I'm not sure I fully agree that the customer has no responsibility, we see episodes where customers are quite happy to pay the estimated bill (which is far under the real usage) , or an energy company has acted upon customer supplied information, I suppose as I send in meter readings every month then I am on top of mine and hard as winter bills come in at least they are then quickly out of the way . I'm not in a higher tax bracket and get no state help as well as I have to pay CS . but bills have to be paid

jalexa

DUTR wrote: »

I'm not sure I fully agree that the customer has no responsibility, we see episodes where customers are quite happy to pay the estimated bill...

Did you read past "responsibility"? I said "...It is reasonable only to check that the numbers on the bill are the numbers provided, or close to the numbers currently displayed on the meter registers"

In other words check that "estimates" are accurate.

I agree too many customers appear not to have clue about their bills.

DreamerV

If I used the electricity, I'd expect to pay for it, whosever mistake it was, but I'd expect the extra to be factored into the longer term so that my dd increased to pay it off over the next year or year and a half. If it had been years though, and it was the company's fault, then I'd expect them to backbill for much less. This happened to my family where although a dd was being paid, the credit was just building up for 6 years and the reading hadn't been moving. They never checked the meter (they were meant to yearly) - in the end a figure was settled on for the couple of years just gone, bearing in mind 1 member of family who used the most energy had left the house.

Frodo365

Just double checked my old bills that I get emailed, there aren't even estimates or breakdowns of what I was using just the price i pay for gas and electricity. thanks to a lot of you for your advice. Utility warehouse should be phoning me back some time this week hopefully ill get some one I can understand and that can understand me and not get sent from one department to another.

jalexa

Frodo365 wrote: »

Utility warehouse should be phoning me back some time this week hopefully ill get some one I can understand and that can understand me and not get sent from one department to another.

Although I don't hold you "responsible" in any way, if you are thinking of switching it is important that you get a handle on the "problem" at least where it refers to your comprehension of the meter display in your house. If you don't get it right before the switch, quite likely the problem will remain after the switch except with "final bill knobs on".

Take a photograph of each register, then work out which register updates during the day (peak rate) and which register updates during the night (cheap rate). Then scritinise your bill and work out from the numbers which number has been allocated to which rate and the "identity" of that rate on the meter.

Terrylw1

DUTR wrote: »

I'm not saying it does not or cannot ever happen, I'm sure it does.
In some cases though it is the consumer and their principle should be to square up their bills , in the case of the OP it would make a difference of about £17 per month for 12 months, as others mentioned it could have been thousands :eek:

I agree, the consumer should take responsibility...its their money and if you trust other people blindly with your money its your hard luck when it goes wrong.

But there are some points that tend to make me agree with consumers in these cases:

1 - there are tens of thousands of meters out there with stickers on them to reverse the rates. Many of these stickers have been found missing and in the case of some meters from "the good old days" the policy was not sticker them as they always read them so either their readers or the office staff had been trained to reverse them. Now this was fine until deregulation under REMA allowed these agents to operate across regions, new operators to join the market and some have even gone under or decided to push suppliers away at contract renewal in favour of the suppliers that have bought out. Due to all this, those old agreements no longer exist which meant consumers readings started coming in the wrong way round. In some cases, even a change in internal management within the readers has caused every customer in the thousands to suffer this problem...flooding the supplier with rubbish data and triggering a contract level complaint.

2 - there is no national convention for meter registers and stupidly the registers used for data transmission to suppliers differs to what the meter actually says. Blame ofgem for this, extreme stupidity not establishing a nation guidance on how to configure the meters. Agents can configure digital metering to what they want and its commonplace when a supplier moves his contract to a new meter operator that they won't use the registers and insist on costing the supplier money to remap them all. This lack of guidance also means that when a new agent is used, thy only understand their own purchased metering so there is no help suppliers have to help their customers understand them and you are often forces you Google them, if you can even find them!

3 - there are converted business properties by the tens of thousands out there with large business metering that brings in 9+ registers, even 15+ and due to point 2 the supplier
doesnt have a clue how they should be read.