Electric meters

JUDE

we are buying a new house that previously was rented out and it has an electricity meter installed that you have to put money on with a card/key.
obviously we wish to change back to a conventional meter, but am having difficulties finding out from any elec supplier how much and how long this will take as we dont own the property yet.
does any one have any idea how long this process may take and costs involved please?

coolcats

I've just had mine done through british gas and it was free, the changing meter took about an hour. From when I phoned to them doing it the wait was just over a week. Although I believe its not free with all supplies. And if I wanted it moved that would of cost money.

JUDE

cheers coolcats, was worried we were going to be stuck with the meter for weeks!

ic

Do you already have an account with a supplier now? Suppliers may be unwilling to change unless they know you have good history. When I moved house nine years ago, I transferred my existing supplier over, and then once they were in control of the supply they swapped out the meters for me. I arranged all this in advance of moving. In the interim period - maybe a month, I was stuck on the prepayment meters.

Note when you do move in you must contact the existing suppliers to set up an account with them and have new cards from them - if you continue to use the cards left by the previous people, you could wind up paying off their debts which are attached to their cards.

JUDE

the meter that is there shows there is £5 credit still on it and and apparently you have to go to the PO to top it up.
I rang our existing supplier here and they said they don't supply the new property, but couldn't say who did. They gave me a number for the overall suppliers, but they wont give me any info as we don't own the property yet.

Wywth

JUDE wrote: »

we are buying a new house that previously was rented out and it has an electricity meter installed that you have to put money on with a card/key.
obviously we wish to change back to a conventional meter, but am having difficulties finding out from any elec supplier how much and how long this will take as we dont own the property yet.
does any one have any idea how long this process may take and costs involved please?

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/switch-prepaid-gas-electricity#freecreditmeter

matelodave

We move three years ago and inherited a prepayment (key) two rate meter (for storage heaters). We wanted to go to a credit meter and we wanted a single rate as we were getting rid of the storage heaters. The existing supplier (EDF) change it to a credit meter (it may have helped that we had been customers of EDF at our previous place). We phoned them the day we moved in (Tuesday) and it was changed on the Friday. The key had to be recharged at the PO and was quite costly, even for the four days that we had it.

The engineer insisted that as he was taking out a two rate meter then he had to replace it with one.

So another phone call to get it changed to single rate working

As far as I remember it took about 10 days for them to send another bloke round - took him two minutes to re-programme it. It was all done free of charge.

We had to stay on their standard tariff whilst all this was going on as we were planning to swap suppliers and didn't want to get locked in and a new supplier wouldn't do the meter swapping

We then changed to a fixed deal with E-On

We are now with Scottish Power until November when we'll probably change again if they can't offer the best deal - we are all electric so a cheap tariff is important to us

We had to do a meter swap for my mum several years ago (pre-pay to credit and then move from dual to single rate), they took about four weeks but did it all for free

dogshome

From the posts, the OP is in the process of buying the house, in which case finding out who the current supplier is useful, but on no account should he/she talk to them until moving-in day when he/she reports their occupation and meter readings

The OP must also get a meter card for his 'new' pre-pay account immediately, any card in the previous occupiers name that is left in the house should not be used