Is it legal to sell a house without separate electricity meter?

emv

We bought a house 2 months ago which was part of a larger development. After much investigation it turns out that our electricity meter only covers night storage heaters whilst the electricity supplied to lights/sockets is on a separate meter which also supplies the rest of the development. The rest is owned by a developer who is selling off the rest as separate units with separate meters. But he'd like us to pay for a sub - meter so we can be billed for the rest of our supply. But nothing in the searches/sale paperwork suggested that we would have to do this. It doesn't really seem reasonable to have to pay the costs of this to me as surely he should have put this in place before the sale completed? The same applies to water too, he'd like us to pay for a new meter as we have no separate supply.

Em

anselld

Why can't he just rewire your lights onto the same meter as your heating? i.e. what he should have done in the first place.

jc808

so youre getting free electricity?

id !!!! the storage heaters off and get a load of electric fan heaters...
if he has a problem, let him pay for a meter

cheeky so and so

Owain_Moneysaver

What response did the seller give to your solicitor's enquiries about utilites connections? Your solicitor is the person to speak to about this as only they know what was agreed in the terms of sale.

theartfullodger

It is entirely legal to sell a house with a meter: It may not have mains electric...

emv

There is mains electricity, I guess my question should be "Is it legal/moral to charge for the installation of a meter that we expected to be in place?". The seller information in response to the question about metered utilities is "There are some meters on site but full details are not available". We're looking into getting photo-voltaic cells installed to generate our own electricity which I believe involves changing meter anyway so perhaps we just wait for that installation to take place & sort it that way.

dj1471

emv wrote: »

"There are some meters on site but full details are not available"

This should have raised a massive red flag with your solicitor.

In any case, if you proceeded without properly investigating this I suspect you are screwed...

Do you not have any kind of agreement to cover the shared utilities? Is the house freehold or leasehold? Do you pay a maintenance charge?

chanz4

I would be asking your energy provider , makes me wonder if your service is even legally installed your developer also can only install legally after the main one.

emv

We had so many issues with our solicitor, I have a big complaint ongoing & this wasn't flagged up at all. The house is freehold & there's an agreement to become a member of a management company once all properties are sold (we were the first to buy) but only to contribute towards shared sewage costs & road maintenance, no mention at all of utilities.

dj1471

I think you need to instruct a solicitor to investigate this. There are so many potential issues it's impossible to give you meaningful advice.

Maybe speak to your local council's building control as well because this all sounds very fishy (and potentially unsafe, depending on how exactly your two mains supplies are being delivered).

emv

Hilariously it turns out that all of the other phone lines also run through our house so in theory we control all of the other house's phone lines! Hoping that we can use this as a bargaining tool to sort out electricity and water etc.