Powergen putting DD up - help!

Pixiegirl_2

Is there anything i can do? I've been a bit daft and not kept a close eye on what was happening with my powergen gas and elec bills.

we pay by monthly dd and were paying £71 a month. now they say we are £650 in debt so have upped it to £189 a month til it's paid off!

ouch!

is there anything i can do? i rang them and they said no that was it - i said we couldn't afford it - tough basically

anyone have experience of this?

lemontart

they are partly at fault here as they did not moniter usage and did not alter dd to cover it before - in my experience the companies reviewed every time they sent bill out and adjusted accordingly............odd though when it went down they never reduced dd on raised it when usage up. Powergen used to review and alter regularly when I was with them.

edina

Pixiegirl wrote: »

Is there anything i can do? I've been a bit daft and not kept a close eye on what was happening with my powergen gas and elec bills.

we pay by monthly dd and were paying £71 a month. now they say we are £650 in debt so have upped it to £189 a month til it's paid off!

ouch!

is there anything i can do? i rang them and they said no that was it - i said we couldn't afford it - tough basically

anyone have experience of this?

I've had the same thing happen to me also, again my fault for not keeping a watch on bills. My monthly bill has to go up from £41 to £130!!!......I've got to try & pay that off as i dont want to take weeks to clear. I can't believe that powergen let my debt go that far before contacting me.

Cardew

Pixiegirl wrote: »

Is there anything i can do? I've been a bit daft and not kept a close eye on what was happening with my powergen gas and elec bills.

we pay by monthly dd and were paying £71 a month. now they say we are £650 in debt so have upped it to £189 a month til it's paid off!

ouch!

is there anything i can do? i rang them and they said no that was it - i said we couldn't afford it - tough basically

anyone have experience of this?

You have had, in effect, an interest free loan which is to be extended for another few months. So by allowing a debt like that to build up, PG have lost out and you have gained.

Most companies will extend the payback period to correspond to the time it has taken the debt to build up.

You may be able to negotiate a slightly longer period to pay back and hence reduce monthly payments.

However the bottom line is that you have had the 'goods' and PG want their money.

McAzrael

I believe, although my source is less than reliable, that Powergen will initially will work out the new DD by spreading the balance over 6 months. If you hastle the customer service people they can stretch it to 9 months. Ring them and ask them how they have calculated the figure, and negotiate. You could threaten to pay the balance and go back to quarterly billing (you don't have to have any intention of doing so). Utility firms love monthly DD and hate quarterly cheques.

trisha

We changed from Staywarm to Powergen energy guarantee in May, the last Staywarm payment was for 29 May.

Just received a quarterly statement from Powergen and we were in debt by £152.
We phoned them and apparently for some unknown reason they hadn't taken any dd payments from us, so they wanted to put our dd payments up from £74 to £89 to cover the debts (which were no fault of our own), but couldn't adjust them back to the agreed £74

To cut a long story short we have told them to take a one off payment for the amount owing and we will see what happens next quarter.

pnq06

Hiya,

I'm in the same situation... Approx £300 in arrears and apparently my DD was going up from £50 pm to £108 pm :eek:

I kept phoning and they couldn't give a cr*p and then I practically broke down and told them I had a baby on the way and there was physically nothing in my power that I could do to earn the money... They softened up a bit and gave me 12 months to pay at £83 pm.