Astonished by Powergen bills :0(

bound_angel

My partner and I live in a small 2 bed flat (one bed is used as an office) with Economy 7 on Heatwise with Powergen. We normally pay on the bill arrival every quarter. Weve been here 3 years now.
Our bills have been getting more and more enormously expensive.
£208
£111
£273
£581
£160
£613

When we first moved in our bills were about £130 tops over summer/spring and £260 tops over autumn/winter but now theyre heading over £600 per quarter now but we havent got anything new compared to then that could be causing such a huge jump. Our boiler is never switched on before night and only ever for about 3 hours at a time, one room alone is heated as my OH is out most of the day so theres only me, double glazed windows, we have standard white goods - fridgefreezer, washer dryer - only used at night, a Sky box and a small 14" TV, one laptop, energy saving lightbulbs etc. We ever use blankets to block space under the doors to try and keep the flat warm.
We honestly have no idea how we've managed to use so much electricity - we queried it with Powergen when we got the first huge bill but they werent fantastically helpful and we ended up having to pay it or be cut off.
We tried to move to another company and Powergen repeatedly blocked us claiming we owed money when we didnt, that there were problems with out account etc
We suspected there might be a problem with the meter due to the strange jumps - one quarter the meter would say we used only 1 night unit over the entire 3 months, the next it would say we'd used hundreds. Powergen wouldnt even inspect it unless we paid them £70.

Im long term disabled and my OH is a full time student so these bills are quite literally financially crippling for us. Powergen requires us to have a direct debit now of £144 every month to cover our usage.

No matter what we do to try and conserve energy the bills just keep skyrocketing.

TOBRUK

I would switch to another provider as soon as possible. I was with Powergen for a couple of years and the bills used to get bigger and bigger - the direct debits were increased a few times although I felt I was using very little, to the point that I questioned them, wrote letters saying that I thought the bills were wrong but they said that they were right as the bills corresponded with the readings etc.

I wrote to ofcom (is it ofcom, I think it is) and they looked into the matter and although the readings were corresponding to the actual bill there was something not right about it. At this point I was over £150.00 in the red, but after my query they reduced my monthly payment and within about 8 months I was in credit! How was it that I was paying less a month and went from £150.00 in the red to being in credit - now that is very odd!

Anyway, as soon as I was in credit I switched I left Powergen as soon as possible and everything is fine now. I do not understand it, how they were doing it whether they were charging more (seeing that the readings were adding up to total with them) and swindling me - not sure what happened between them and my complaint to ofcom, but strange how things turned round?! I would never go to powergen ever again.

dc

Is the DD hike a result of them trying to reclaim past underpayments?
IMHO, Another good reason for paying bills quarterly in arrears.

I would check the actual meter readings from past bills.

Comparing money paid per bill is not very accurate as the amounts paid could be for estimated readings. Also with price hikes, this winter bills have been the highest for all consumers, so naturally cost will have increased considerably from last year(s).

You need to compare units used, and nothing else for a true comparison of increase in useage .Then see what has chaged in your daily useage that might explain any increase.

I would also check if a move from Economy 7 to standard metering. would benefit you, as daytime units are costly.

Especially as you seem to use gas central heating and the tariff you are on was meant for electrical night storage heating.

bound_angel

Believe me we've tried to swap providers :-( Atlantic offered us a deal paying £65 a month which is less than half of what Powergen want but Powergen literally stopped us everytime we tried to switch. They claimed we owed them about £500 in bills that had been paid well before, they claimed we had multiple meters, they claimed our account had errors on it, they claimed our meter had problems. A new excuse everytime to stop us from going anywhere and now we're so deep into the red with them that it will take us months to pay this off - only to get another whopper of a bill.

bound_angel

We've been making a fuss with the estimated readings - Powergen kept trying to use estimated ones when we've given them real ones so we harassed them until we were given bills based on the real readings. The most recent bill had originally been estimated despite giving them readings again - when they revised the bill it was £85 difference lower but still v.expensive.

Mizz_Pink

Ive just phoned our leccy supplier to request being taken off Economy 7 as some nice person on here worked out that we use 12% of night leccy. Southern Electric said its best if you have storage heaters or a swimming pool/hot tub etc or if you do a lot of washing or drying at night.

Our service charge has dropped from 10.24p to 6.95p and our new flat rate has dropped from 10.44p to 9.05p.

See if you can work out just how much leccy you use at night and possibly change your meter.

Cardew

Can you post your consumption in kWh for day and night rates.

One problem could be that your storage heaters( I assume you have them?) are coming on during daytime electricity periods.

Most are wired so this can't happen but not all.

dc

I assumed that , but there is a mention of a boiler in the op.

bound_angel

Our boiler has two switches which we turn on manually during the night - is there any way I can find out if its coming on automatically.

For the past month our meter readings say:
Primary/secondary day: 1010
Boost: 0
Afternoon: 47
Night: 258

bound_angel

Sorry, ours are storage heaters. I keep calling them boilers. *doh*

dc

I dont know much about how storage heaters are wired, but I would have thought that they would have a time switch that was set to follow the cheap rate time period overnight. Together with an overide switch for daytime boosting.

Beware that the older metering set-ups do not follow BST/GMT changes, the 7 hour period is fixed, so when the clocks change the heating period doesn't and could possibly overlap into the higher charge band if you are not aware of this.