Please Help! gas bill £2850

Lynds555

Hi Everyone, I’m new to the forums and just need a little help and advice with an extremely large gas bill I’ve just received. Three years ago I went through a divorce and my daughter and I moved into a studio apartment. Two weeks ago I received a letter from Corona Energy threatening to have my gas disconnected and legal action taken against me. The bill was for the amount of £2610, this was the first time I’d ever heard from this company.

I was certain I was paying my gas and electricity to EDF via direct debits and received quarterly statements. I then went to check the last EDF statement I received and realised that it was only electricity that I have been paying for and realising that I’d made a dreadful mistake.

I contacted Corona to query this invoice and they advised me that it was only an estimate reading and I had to provide them with the reading on the meter. The meter was installed a few weeks before I moved in and was organised by my landlord and therefore the meter started from 0. The meter reading I gave Corona was 745516 m3. I have an electric cooker and shower and my flat is well insulated so the heating is needed for no more than 10 mins and my studio flat is then warm for the next few hours. They advised me that they would send a new and accurate bill within a few weeks.

I received a new bill today and to my astonishment the bill was £2850. It appears that Corona hasbeen supplying my gas at commercial rates of 5.5p per unit and £2.70 per day service charge. Obviously I’m a residential customer and I’ve been trying to do some research online and believe that I’m bound by residential licensing which means that the supplier should give me adequate notice before cutting off my supply and also give me the option to pay what is owed over a period of time. No-one has ever tried to invoice or contact me within the last three years and I feel that it is quite unfair to receive an extremely large bill out of the blue.

As a single parent I am trying hard to make ends meet and I realise that I do owe money to the gas company but believe I should be charged at a residential rate and given an option to pay over a period of time.

I’m not quite sure where to go from here and would appreciate any help and advice.

Kind regards

Lyndsay

Ryune

Corona are a commercial supplier, they don't do domestic. My first thought would be that the landlord has messed up when the supply has gone in - Corona wouldn't have taken it on had they been told it was for a tennant.

Best to chat to them. They can't put you on a domestic tariff as they won't have one but you can probably hash something out with them. VAT will be at 20% unless its low usage and you'll be charged CCL (a business energy tax) in the same basis. This can be removed. Ultimately you will have to pay something but there will be room for negotiation on how much and when.

Also ask why so long to raise the charges. My suspicion will be that the landlord has used an IGT (independent transporter) to put the supply in sine theyre cheaper to install but they're also notoriously bad at communicating details to suppliers to enable them to bill. That's Corona's problem though.

runforlife

If you are able and have some time I found this website which has a formula for calculating gas bills with British Gas.

http://www.frugalways.co.uk/life.php/british-gas-formula-used-to-calculate-gas-bills

Now clearly I accept that other companies may use different methods but the purpose behind my way of thinking is that if you can go to Corona with some figures and those figures are calculated using British Gas's methods then maybe you stand a chance of being successful in your negotiations. Note it is dated 2011 but I guess it hasn't changed that much.

The calculation is dependant on the calorific value of gas which changes every day! You could, if you have the whereforall, research historic calorific values but that would be an incredible amount of work. Instead I propose you provide a calculation using the lowest possible, the median and the highest possible. I've no idea what the difference will be. More on calorific values can be found here

http://www2.nationalgrid.com/UK/Industry-information/Gas-transmission-operational-data/Calorific-Value-Description/

Yes, it looks complicated and will require some understanding and some quiet moments of calculation. However if almost £3000 is at stake then I suggest its well worth it. The good news is that you have the meter readings. Zero to present day.

Good luck.

molerat

The CV will be calculated using the sum of the daily CVs divided by the number of days, that is how I work mine out and it is spot on with the bill every time, so the above is of no real help to the OP. Their problem is that they have not paid for the gas they have used for the past 3 years, it is on an expensive commercial tariff and carries 20% VAT. Other posters on here have had similar problems with a commercial supplier in a domestic situation and I do not think any of them have come out of it well I am afraid, only getting minor concessions from the supplier. Hopefully one of them will pop in with some advice.

[Deleted User]

Lynds555 wrote: »

Hi Everyone, I’m new to the forums and just need a little help and advice with an extremely large gas bill I’ve just received. Three years ago I went through a divorce and my daughter and I moved into a studio apartment. Two weeks ago I received a letter from Corona Energy threatening to have my gas disconnected and legal action taken against me. The bill was for the amount of £2610, this was the first time I’d ever heard from this company.

I was certain I was paying my gas and electricity to EDF via direct debits and received quarterly statements. I then went to check the last EDF statement I received and realised that it was only electricity that I have been paying for and realising that I’d made a dreadful mistake.

I contacted Corona to query this invoice and they advised me that it was only an estimate reading and I had to provide them with the reading on the meter. The meter was installed a few weeks before I moved in and was organised by my landlord and therefore the meter started from 0. The meter reading I gave Corona was 745516 m3. I have an electric cooker and shower and my flat is well insulated so the heating is needed for no more than 10 mins and my studio flat is then warm for the next few hours. They advised me that they would send a new and accurate bill within a few weeks.

I received a new bill today and to my astonishment the bill was £2850. It appears that Corona hasbeen supplying my gas at commercial rates of 5.5p per unit and £2.70 per day service charge. Obviously I’m a residential customer and I’ve been trying to do some research online and believe that I’m bound by residential licensing which means that the supplier should give me adequate notice before cutting off my supply and also give me the option to pay what is owed over a period of time. No-one has ever tried to invoice or contact me within the last three years and I feel that it is quite unfair to receive an extremely large bill out of the blue.

As a single parent I am trying hard to make ends meet and I realise that I do owe money to the gas company but believe I should be charged at a residential rate and given an option to pay over a period of time.

I’m not quite sure where to go from here and would appreciate any help and advice.

Kind regards

Lyndsay

Confused. So this gas bill is for the last three years? And this is the first letter or bill you've had off them?

kaya

My wife works for corona but is away on maternity leave at the moment so can't really help you out, as mentioned before corona don't do domestic and are never likley to so how you have been billed by them for residential is a mystery, in fact I couldn't get corona to supply my energy to my home if I tried and my wife is an employee of theirs! All sounds a bit fishy to me

macman

You are reading the meter wrongly. Metric meters have 5 digits before the decimal point-you ignore any digits after that (in red). Are you sure it's a metric meter and not imperial?
Assuming it is metric, you have used 74551 cu m in 3 years. That's about 20,774kWh, or around 7,000 kWh per year-a perfectly reasonable amount for heating a small property (and presumably also for hot water, which you don't mention, and is the second major usage after heating).
However I still can't make any sense of your billing figures. That kWh usage at 5.5p would cost about £1,142, but with the service charge at £2.70 per day it should be over £4,000 (the s/c alone comes to £2,956).
So I suspect that you've been billed for much less than 3 full years.
Please post the correct figures from the bill: we need no. of days and kWh's not cu m.
But have you not read your meter(s) once in 3 years and submitted readings? The norm is to do that every 3 months if you want to avoid estimated billing.

[Deleted User]

macman wrote: »

You are reading the meter wrongly. Metric meters have 5 digits before the decimal point-you ignore any digits after that (in red). Are you sure it's a metric meter and not imperial?
Assuming it is metric, you have used 74551 cu m in 3 years. That's about 20,774kWh, or around 7,000 kWh per year-a perfectly reasonable amount for heating a small property (and presumably also for hot water, which you don't mention, and is the second major usage after heating).
However I still can't make any sense of your billing figures. That kWh usage at 5.5p would cost about £1,142, but with the service charge at £2.70 per day it should be over £4,000 (the s/c alone comes to £2,956).
So I suspect that you've been billed for much less than 3 full years.
Please post the correct figures from the bill: we need no. of days and kWh's not cu m.
But have you not read your meter(s) once in 3 years and submitted readings? The norm is to do that every 3 months if you want to avoid estimated billing.

Definitely something fishy going on here.

Doesnt read meter, doesnt see bills, and doesnt even notice they're not paying for gas.

Surely in 3 years before it got to this stage there would have a multitude of bills, letters etc delivered to this address?

Got a story about my brother in 'similar; circumstances - He claimed he didn't know he had to do a tax return, and claimed he didn't know he wasn't paying enough tax. Then three years later claimed no-one ever contacted him from HMRC.

Of course, then the big bad HMRC were so nasty expecting him to pay all this money that he didn't have. (i.e. had spent down the pub!).

Please OP tell me you've not ignored loads of letters like my idiot brother! (Apologies if this is not the case).

Ryune

The only times corona will do domestic is when its things like supplies for Housing Associations etc (e.g. big supplies for multi-stories or community heating that the association manages). For all intents and purposes though they are treated as commercial (supply contract, penalties if they go out of contract etc).

They won't supply domestic end users. What can happen though is when a supply gets installed either the owner or the contractor will appoint a supplier. If they've not been clear what the supply is for then Corona may take it on if asked, particuarly if its a landlord who may have done it under the name of a company.


[quote=[Deleted User];64466380]
Surely in 3 years before it got to this stage there would have a multitude of bills, letters etc delivered to this address?[/QUOTE]
Possibly, but as I said I would not be surprised if it was an IGT. IGT's are hated by suppliers as they're crap and often do not pass the details suppliers need to bill accounts (as opposed to Transco / National Grid that are generally quite good).

On the commercial side some suppliers won't deal with them. I've seen supplies with good spends (£500,000+) be turned down by suppliers for quoting as they refuse to deal with the hassle of IGT's.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

The bills may have been going to the landlord for 3 years, and he ignored them. The energy provider can't intuit when people move into and out of properties.

Impossible to tell without further information, but there's every chance the OP has been naive, rather than negligent.

Cardew

macman wrote: »

Assuming it is metric, you have used 74551 cu m in 3 years. That's about 20,774kWh, or around 7,000 kWh per year-a perfectly reasonable amount for heating a small property (and presumably also for hot water, which you don't mention, and is the second major usage after heating).
.

???


I make 74551 cubic metres about 835,000kWh!


Which ain't a reasonable amount!