SWALEC mismanaged my account now want back payments!

choccywoccy

I had problems with Swalec a year ago, when they billed me over £20,000 ( i kid you not!) it turns out after an investigation they had been billing us incorrectly for a 5 dial meter when we are on a 6 dial meter. They admitted they were at fault and reset our account, they refunded me £211.87 as well! I continued to pay my direct debit of £100 a month and have not had a bill from them since december 2014. We rent the property, it is a 5 bed house and has solar panels. the heating is electric underfloor which we hardly use, no gas.

In July this year we recieved another bill for £2143.35 :eek: I assumed a similar problem had occured and rang them, and they initiated another "investigation". Basically they have written to me today to say that the bill is correct and that our average monthly usage is actually around £299 a month, so they want to increase the direct debit to that PLUS and extra £178 to pay off the debt in 12 months!! They have admitted thier failings to bill us correctly, and taking an extraordinary amount of time to investigate and say they should not have refunded me the £211.87 so have offered us a "goodwill payment" of £60! :rotfl:

My question is - is it worth taking this further? I cannot believe we use £299 a month, even so I cannot afford a direct debit of £477 a month, I have 4 children and am on housing benefit! its not MY fault that the debt built up over 12 months either, I paid my direct debit in good faith, gave them the readings on time so why should I have to pay for thier mistakes? Any advice would be helpful.

System

Hi. Sadly, you do have to pay for their mistakes but before you do so SWALEC needs to provide you with a bill based on actual rather than estimated readings. It is then a simple check by you to determine whether the amount owed is correct. That said, a bill of nearly £3600 per year does indeed look to be very high so this is why you need to review SWALEC's calculations.

Monthly DD payments are nothing more than a payment on account, and the amount is based on your projected usage, and past historical data for the property collected by what are known as data collectors. SWALEC's billing procedures have clearly fallen short of what is acceptable practice but even if you took it to The Energy Ombudsman I doubt whether you would get more than £60 and time to pay.

All organisations have a right to correct an incorrect bill and they have up to 6 years to re-claim what the organisation is owed.

Equally, householders have a personal responsibility to check that the bills that they receive are accurate.

[Deleted User]

By 6 dial meter do you mean a meter showing tenths of a unit on the last digit like most analogue meters ? do or a true 6 dial meter which would show the last digit as single kwhr units not tenths.All 6 dial analogue meters are billed for the first 5 digits only.Usually only business meters are billed on 6 dial meters,its very rare for domestics to be billed on 6 dial meters.

choccywoccy

sacsquacco wrote: »

By 6 dial meter do you mean a meter showing tenths of a unit on the last digit like most analogue meters ? do or a true 6 dial meter which would show the last digit as single kwhr units not tenths.All 6 dial analogue meters are billed for the first 5 digits only.Usually only business meters are billed on 6 dial meters,its very rare for domestics to be billed on 6 dial meters.

Im trying to upload a picture of it with no success.. but I have emailed photos of the meter to Swalec so they have looked at these and said its a 6 dial meter?