eon want direct debit upped from £98 - £300 a month!!!

cord123

Hi all,

just given a meter reading to eon and they have said that we have £1200 in debit so they want to up our bills from £98 to £300 (gas and electric)

We moved in in May and this is what they said the dd up as... we carried over some debt from out last house (i think it was this amount) but they assured us this dd was fine as we are now in a three bed terrace and out all day so wouldnt be using as much as we were in aour 4 bed detached....

can they increase this by such an amount? I am going on maternity leave in feb so we simply cant afford this!

Cardew

You don't say how much debt you 'carried over' and I am assuming that you read your meters when you moved in and supplied E-on with those readings?? If you didn't you could be paying for the previous occupant's consumption.

The Direct Debit you sign enables them to take any sum from your account, as long as they inform you in advance.(which they have done). They are entitled to take the whole £1,200 debt.

That said you can normally negotiate a lower payment and pay back the arrears over a longer period. However if £100 a month(since May) was insufficient to cover your consumption over the summer and you have built up a large debit balance, you are going to have huge bills during the cold winter.

espresso

Why is buying gas and electricity so difficult for some customers? When you buy provisions at the shop, you see what you have spent and pay on the spot. When you use gas or electricity, you can also see what you have used if you can be bothered to read your meters and then you know how much debt you are building up.

You obviously have not read your meters or been paying enough to cover your actual usage. What has it to do with your energy supplier that you are "going on maternity" leave in February?

The best that you can expect is to be allowed to pay off your debt over a similar period that it built up if they decide that you could do this, while still using energy during this time.

E.ON_Company_Representative:_Helena

Hi cord123,

Cardew and espresso have given some good information already so thanks for this

I'm sorry you've found yourself in this situation.

Did you give a read when you moved in from the gas and elec meters? Have you been providing regular reads to us and did we use these to bill?

It really does sound like you have been receiving under estimated bills and now we've had an accurate read it's caused what we call a catch up bill.

I understand you also carried some debt over with you.

What we need to do now is to make sure you're on the best tariff and see if we can spread the debt over a little bit longer to make the monthly payments more manageable. But you will need to be paying to cover the ongoing usage and the debt.

There is also lot's of energy saving help we can offer you.

You may also be better managing your account online, as this way you can pop reads on all the time and keep everything up to date.

Hope this helps a little.

Helena

macman

Unfortunately you should have used the period of low usage from May to now to pay back some of your debt. You say that you 'think' you carried over £1200 debt from the old property-so how much of your new £98 DD was current usage and how much repayment? With a debt that huge, surely you must know that? £98pm will just about cover ongoing consumption in such a property, but certainly not repay any debt. Even given 24 months to pay, they would still have wanted another £50pm on top of actual usage.
If your problem isn't underestimated readings (caused mainly by your failure to submit any reads since May) then it's down to a failure to agree a sufficient DD level to recover the debt.
If you confirm what your actual debt transfer was then more sense can be made of this.

cord123

The thing is we went on what we were advised... they actually advised £10 a month less but we added £10 to it...

the debt was left over from the previous address... they originally read the meter wrong (an 8 instead of a 0) once that was sorted they said we owed x amount...

we paid the dd on what we were advised by the so called 'expert'

my going on mat leave has nothing to do with it... other than we will have less money so it is more of issue...

why did they not advise us to have higher direct debits from the start rather than treble them now?

espresso

cord123 wrote: »

The thing is we went on what we were advised... they actually advised £10 a month less but we added £10 to it...

the debt was left over from the previous address... they originally read the meter wrong (an 8 instead of a 0) once that was sorted they said we owed x amount...

we paid the dd on what we were advised by the so called 'expert'

my going on mat leave has nothing to do with it... other than we will have less money so it is more of issue...

why did they not advise us to have higher direct debits from the start rather than treble them now?

Sorry but you the customer are the expert because you know exactly how much you are using and you can work out how much your DD payments need to cover this usage and any debt on your account.

I always tell my supplier how much my DD payments will be and they have always agreed to this, after showing them how I have arrived at this amount.

cord123

but we have been with them years so they know our usage...... they said that as we are moving from a detached to a terraced out bills would substantially come down...

Andy_WSM

cord123 wrote: »

why did they not advise us to have higher direct debits from the start rather than treble them now?

How can they possibly know you're going to use more energy than Joe average? It's ridiculous to try and blame Eon. The energy meters are in your property. Read them, it's simple maths to work out what you are spending!

Cardew

cord123 wrote: »

but we have been with them years so they know our usage...... they said that as we are moving from a detached to a terraced out bills would substantially come down...

I am afraid, like the rest of us millions of customers, you a simply a load of digits on The Computer; the days of personal monitoring of customer's accounts has long gone.

All things being equal you would expect a small terrace house to have lower bills than a larger detached house - but were things equal? Could the new house have a lower efficiency boiler for example.

Given you had run up a huge debit balance in your previous house, surely it would have occurred to you to carefully monitor your gas/electricity consumption and bills; particularly when £98 monthly is way below the average household expenditure.

matelodave

A reasonable estimate of what you should be paying for your ongoing usage (if you can't be bothered to read your meter and work it out properly) would be about £100 a month = £1200 for a year.

You also have to add to this an amount to pay off your arrears which if you reckon is £1200 (at least another years worth) then you should have been able to work out that your direct debit ought to have been about £200.

It's hard to have any sympathy when you obviously haven't taken charge of a problem that you had six months ago and had the opportunity to try and resolve during the summer months.

You should have been a bit surprised when you got a bill for £1200 and considered doing something about it rather than just let it get bigger.