Previous occupant bills underestimated caused by bills to soar?

Terrylw1

I'm a little unsure of something now.

Its obvious that any usage from Jan is a 3rd party dispute, but prior to that you need a re-estimation to close the account. This is where I have a problem.

You said they provided 2 readings over the previous year to Eon. This means they will or should have used them in the estimation of the account, unless those readings were found to be incorrect hence not entered into consumption histories.

This could also point to an advisor or automated process estimating the final bill too low.

myright

and your point is?

Terrylw1

The point is, if the calculated it using those 2 reads in the previous year, its going to be correct or close. So, you may not get much of a change.

If they didn't use those readings as already mentioned, then the situation returns to low estimation.

Or did they knowingly provide low customer reads? If so, that would force the estimation to be too low. However, how can you even check that now? You can't sadly. Which means you are back to working out your average kwh per day with any seasonal variance and then backtracking to your start date.

myright

yes I unfortunately believe the occupants were giving low readings on purpose. Wouldn't the energy company have to hold some responsibility that they did not check for themselves?

Terrylw1

myright wrote: »

yes I unfortunately believe the occupants were giving low readings on purpose. Wouldn't the energy company have to hold some responsibility that they did not check for themselves?

Suppliers are licenced to obtain readings a) every 2 years in gas as the Last Inspection Date (LID) is held by the distributor or b) every 2 years from switch date in elec.

They are held under a different licence to validate all reads and pass them to their agents to enter into "settlement", effectively their bills to the distributors.

So, if they don't need to do the mandatory inspection, its entirely possible for a customer to constantly enter reads that are too low into settlement. The agent the supplier passes your customer reads to will use previous consumption history. So, its not as easy as it seems but if they don't get in and you do it enough over a year or 2, the result is under consumption in the agents data thus allowing incorrectly low issued reads as valid.

I'm not advocating that, just explaining how this could have happened without the supplier or agent challenging them until they perform a site visit resulting in a reading.

Its worth noting that suppliers tend to operate low consumption reports, so if you set the bar too low, they would probably spot it.