2k electricity bill!! Could it be a faulty meter?

laurac12

I moved into my flat last May and have been paying £55 a month for electricity, I pay via direct debit.

I called the electricity company in early May with my meter reading, which they said was unusually high and they sent an engineer to read it on 29th May.

Today I have had a letter from the electricity company saying that the meter reading was unusually high and to read it again, and that my bill could be £1983

The meters were last read in January and were correct then, I just cannot fathom that our bill could possibly be almost £2000! Even if we'd left all our storage heaters and appliances on all day long (which we did not) it surely cannot be that high.

I will get my partner to read the meters tonight (its too high for me to read) and give them a call but any ideas on how to tackle this? Needless to say we can't afford a £2k bill.

Cardew

Welcome to the forum.

Do you have the old type meter with dials and a pointer. If so it is very easy to misread as the pointer goes clockwise and anti-clockwise

Reading a dial meter
If the pointer falls between two
numbers, always read the lower number – in Fig A you would write down the number
4.
If the pointer is directly over a number always record it – in Fig B you
would write down the number 5.
If the pointer on a dial falls between 9 and
0, reduce the reading already taken for the dial on the left by one – for
example, if your original recorded 5, reduce this to 4.
Following these
instructions, the correct meter reading for the dial in the diagram will be
44928.

laurac12

Thank you Cardew for your input but I'm 90% sure it is a digital meter (its too high for me to see and check!)

Just to add to this, I am with Npower, my reading on 21st Jan was 43550. The reading on 29th May was 56749.

My bill from September to January was £201.36 leaving me in credit. I just cannot see how now its 13000 units higher! Especially as its summertime.

Cardew

If you have storage heaters(see initial post) you surely will be on Economy 7 with two meter readings.

laurac12

I'm not on Economy 7, I have two meters on my properly but the other meter is a business meter and is for the shop underneath my flat. (I gave both serial numbers to Npower when I moved in, they told me one was registered as a residential meter and the other was a business meter).

Should I be on Economy 7? I haven't heard of this tariff before. When I moved into the property there was only the one meter and I was never asked if I had an all electric property or not.

DVardysShadow

laurac12 wrote: »

I'm not on Economy 7, I have two meters on my properly but the other meter is a business meter and is for the shop underneath my flat. (I gave both serial numbers to Npower when I moved in, they told me one was registered as a residential meter and the other was a business meter).

Should I be on Economy 7? I haven't heard of this tariff before. When I moved into the property there was only the one meter and I was never asked if I had an all electric property or not.

You need to be sure that

• the meter you are being billed on is the one you think is yours
• the meter that you think is yours is actually measuring your supply
• your meter is not measuring the supply to the shop.

Look at those 3 checks carefully - the first 2 look like the same thing, but they are actually different issues.

glasgow_DFW

Are you sure that both meters are not for you?
For example you say that you have storage heaters but you have a one rate meter.
Could you have a domestic rate meter that records your day and night pluged in usage and the other meter for a seprate circite that will run your heating and hotwater. This sould be charged at a lower rate if this is the case.
What sort of heating do you have?
Could the property have the two meters for your usage the suppier that you have has only taken over the heating meter and you are not being billed correctly.

Terrylw1

That's a significant amount of usage.

Are you sure you've read the same one each time? If you read one meter that was much lower, then your correct meter, it would cause a big jump.

Are you sure which meter is yours? They can be labelled incorrectly by sparky's so trace the wiring from your fuse box to your meter.

In terms of E7, like you say, its 2 meters. If you have an off peak circuit, it could be wired to a second off peak meter. So, check this other meter isn't running to your fuse box.

You could share wiring with the business property if a poor conversion has taken place, so you could check your fuse box for any suspect labelling but otherwise its a matter of tracing the wiring. However, if you switch everything off...does the meter reading still advance? If so, it suggests there is something you need to trace.

If you find your wiring is mixed, its tricky to resolve. You get it corrected but the supplier is still holding you responsible but if both properties are with the same supplier, the supplier could measure usage and try to take some of your bill and add it to the business or they could just state its your problem under a 3rd party dispute. The latter would be unfair really.

Richie-from-the-Boro

If its digital does it look like this ?


- and if it does look like the pic you are almost certainly E7 [two rate] capable
- if you have night store[d] heat and night store[d] hot water you would almost certainly benefit from an E7 tariff
- are both meters identical, if so which one is yours ?
- it sounds to me that you have[inadvertently] given the shops costs [reading] to your account and vice~versa

NOTE: There is no difference between "vise versa" and vice versa. "Vise versa" is a common misspelling of vice versa

Wickedkitten

If you have storage heaters and are on a normal tariff then whilst it may not be as high as 2k, it could very well be higher than you expect.

laurac12

What I truly cannot fathom is that between August 2011 and January 2012 we used roughly 2000 Kwh. Now somehow between January 2012 and May 2012 we've used 13000?!? Thats an increase of over 600%! We haven't had any new appliances and we've been using the storage heaters even less than we used to. Even if the wiring is mixed, the same shop has been there all the time, its a cash converters type place so all they use is lights, a computer and to plug things in to test they work when people bring them in. If it was a food place that needed big fridges or ovens I could maybe understand using that amount of electricity.

Thanks for your suggestions on how to proceed with this. I am going to switch everything off (with the exception of the fridge/freezer) while me and my partner are at work today and read the meters before we go and after we come back.

I don't think we've given the wrong meter reading by mistake, the other meter has a reading which is 6 digits long and ours is only 5.

I will call power back today with the meter reading they requested and ask them about the other meter (see if thats registered to any account) and ask how we can go about checking if that meter measures just our usage, just our heating/hot water usage or if it measures both properties usage.

I will also ask the people in the shop below us if they have an electricity meter on their property, if they do then that would indicate that both meters on our property are for us.