How to Register Meters as Residential

vordmeister

I bought a pub that had been closed for a year. It is now my house. Has planning approved for residential and everything.

All of the utilities have been fab apart from British Gas who supply the electricity and gas.

I have been trying to get them to transfer the supply from commercial to residential for the last 3 months. I must have spent a day on the phone. I get encouraging noises but nothing happens. (there have been other issues including an £1800 bill for 3 weeks electricity but that is sorted now).

I would like very much to change to another supplier but am not able to do that until British Gas register my meters as residential on the National Database. In the meantime I have to continue paying out of contract rates (20p/unit electricity etc).

Can I contact the national database myself and get the meters made residential? Posts I found for the databases were old and the phone numbers don't work any more.

Any advice appreciated. It's been a nightmare so far and I can't see a solution other than switching to another company as a pretend business and having them do the switch to residential.

spiro

For elec it has to be your supplier. Has the council reclassified the property so you are now paying domestic council tax rather than uniform business rates? If its domestic, write BG a letter of complaint include acopy of the letter from the council reclassifying the property as domestic. That should sort both fuels.

chanz4

you also need to sign a vat declaration to pay domestic vat. No you cant update the databases yourself, one thing that springs to mind what model gas meter do you have as I suspect you have a U16 msn starts MO16

vordmeister

I don't have the reclassification for downstairs from the council yet - upstairs is residential already. Did manage to get the VAT form from British Gas to fill in (after 2 months).

I think the gas meter is commercial. It's an old one in a big green Transco box with serial number starting with 800. Is that going to be a problem?

I'll try phoning some other companies up. Maybe if I switch to another suppler as a business account it will be easier to switch to residential with them. Can't be any more difficult. Even a business account would be less than the out of contract rates British Gas are still charging me.

Wywth

vordmeister wrote: »

I bought a pub that had been closed for a year. It is now my house. Has planning approved for residential and everything.

vordmeister wrote: »

I don't have the reclassification for downstairs from the council yet - upstairs is residential already.

:huh: .

vordmeister

The reclassification comes after a visit from the valuation officer. Have planning approval but need to break ground in a 'conversion' before the valuation officer will come around.

Wywth

So you only have planning permission, not everything?

When you have carried out the conversion and everything, then you should have no issues getting a residential supply

macman

Having planning approval does not yet make it a residential property-it simply means you have the go-ahead to commence the conversion!
Otherwise you could potentially switch the meters and then never proceed wiht the conversion.

vordmeister

It's still 100% residential use which was enough for the other utilities to give me a residential supply. True enough though I'll be paying more council tax than I need to until I can persuade the valuation officer to come over for a cup of tea.

Made some progress. Went through the loop on the telephone a few more times being passed from person to person until I got to someone who couldn't help and call over.

Today contacted the business department again and explained I was going nowhere and getting no feedback about where the problem might be. They agreed to phone the residential people to try to find out what was going on. I put a complaint in to the complaints email address yesterday and it seems that is being worked on. Great thing about complaints is they get allocated a reference number that I can quote (business guy told me what it was) so hopefully I'll be able to prod it along.

Will post back with what happens.

Fire_Fox

Write a letter, invoke the formal complaints procedure.