Gas and Electric Bills

Sparkle2010

Hi

Having been on a fixed DD since Nov 2012 and given accurate meter readings every month since. My company have just sent an email saying I owe £2994! and my monthly DD is going up to £824! Do you think I'm within my rights to ask for some kind of reduction on that bearing in mind they should have notified me earlier before letting my debit balance rise to such a level. Who has £3k just after Christmas?

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

What was your original DD? Are you sure they've been using your radings? And most importantly, what have you used in KWh?

molerat

So you have used an average £200 per month on top of your DD, I very much doubt it. Give us your meter reads, the type of meter, gas ? electric ? If it is accurate you are not going to get away with a DD of less than around £500 (200 debt, 200 + 100 use) but again I very much doubt it is possible to build up that amount of debt unless you partake in horticultural pursuits.

NPower ?

BargainGalore

Did you not get any bills in past? They should have stated if there was any debt or not. You could then offer to pay more. You could always ask if you can pay the debt over a longer period. Its always wise to monitor your usage and credit to make sure things like this don't happen

matelodave

If you've been giving them regular meter readings, then you should have had a pretty good idea of how much you were using - did you not do a quick sum every now and again to see if what you were paying covered it. Did you not get any bills either through the post or on line. Did you not look at them and make sure that your meter readings were being used


I really find it hard to understand how you could have ramped up that sort of bill anyway, but a bit of on going monitoring would have alerted you to a problem, either with your consumption, the amount of your direct debt or the fact that your bills didn't reflect the readings. In any case it is down to you to make sure your bills are about right


Why should you get a reduction when you obviously haven't checked your own bills. Just bunging a reading through and not checking that it's being used and that your bills are about right just beggars belief.

Caketh

npower are notorious at getting bills wrong. One of my sons and his partner had a bill for £6000 in a two bedroom flat! It turned out, eventually, that they had used next doors reading!

matelodave

The problem is that no one takes the trouble to check their bills, readings or bank statements and then get upset, shocked and even self righteous when they catch up with them and then expect compensation. There's a need to blame someone else and get compensation when simple actions would have stopped bills getting out of hand.

A wrong bill shouldn't be a disaster providing you do something about it and get it sorted out. Just leaving it and hoping it will go away just allows the problem to get worse and harder to solve.

Take charge of your life, don't expect others to do it for you.

Sparkle2010

It seems I have been naive, I had been on 'oil' for the previous 10 years and moved to my new home and needed to sort a gas supplier. Thought I was doing the right thing by using the comparision websites and relying on First Utility to let me know if my DD was too low. They had set the amount and assured me ' the fixed amount would be reassessed periodically throughout the year to ensure my payments were on track'. I believed them.

molerat

That amount of debt build up over just more than 1 year is improbable. If you give us meter reads etc we may be able to find some discrepencies. Never believe what your energy company tells you unless you have verified it yourself, they are all incompetent it is just the depth that varies.

dogshome

You refer to previous Oil heating in your post, so at a guess your problem is with the Gas bill.

Please, please give the start and current Gas meter reading, and most importantly, look at your Gas meter for a marking that will be either ft3 or m3
(In two recent posts FU have mixed up the customers type of Gas meter and overcharged the bills by nearly 200% )

ahqaf

you should observe your meter readings with sincerely.