District Heating Nightmare-Pay As You Go

Diamond78

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays Everyone
Would someone be kind enough and help me understand the figures and charges, as I struggle to work them out please. I am struggling so much with not being able to afford gas. Its really depressing me. I need some help and advice as I am going out of my mind with worry and stress.
After signing my tenancy agreement with Housing Association in 2012, we was informed we had to purchase credit for heat and hot water from our local Londis. When asked if we could choose our own supplier, we was told no but reassured it was much cheaper.
I am a single mum to my teen son since I was pregnant. It has been very hard financially, struggling to make ends meet but have always had food, heat and hot water for my son growing up. Until living here.
Its just me and son, living in a 1st floor 2 bed flat. I have had to endure and go without heat and hot water so many times due to not being able to afford it. I complained to Ener-G Switch2 and landlord as neither were being clear on charges, costs and no billing, costing very high despite the heaters being on a timer and only using the heater of the room we are in. We have 6 heaters. Hallway, kitchen and bathroom is always off. Despite massive reduction in use, as well as reducing bath and showering, it made no difference. I requested a bill from landlord as they own the building and in charge. I wanted to know my usage, breakdown ect. But landlord refused and Switch2 didn't bother.
You have no idea how embarrassing and humiliating it is not being able to wash. But worse for my son who hit puberty. I don't care about myself and I have gone without food for days, to ensure my son doesn't suffer freezing home conditions. It has caused me debt. Despite all the cutting back, inc my son having a bath just once a week. Sep 2014 to March 2015, I paid £480. I did have my mum stay with me for less than 10 days and my brother every now and then. But that's still a lot of money. Both landlord and Switch2 informed me there were no problems and I was topping up/paying the same the year before. Yet they wouldn't provide me the details and break down of my usage.
Last year the charge was 12 pence per kilowatt for heat, Then 9.7 pence from Feb 2015 (Sorry to sound thick. Please don't slaughter me for not understanding, I have really tried to understand it. How does it work out? I don't understand how kWh is worked out.) How do I work out the set charge against £480 I paid?) Is the heat referred to hot water too?)
The heaters would only get hot, when set at high temp, with the individual heaters being turned to max, otherwise only the top half would be warm/hot and bottom half cold. As a result, it did mean, I had to have the heating on longer and higher as the heaters wouldn't get fully hot at the average temp
In May, we were informed of the new G6 meters being installed, along with a new utility agreement. I refused to sign it due to the high cost, I wanted to change supplier as I couldn't afford the costs. Plus have been trying to move.
As I have no rights, I had to allow the new installation. No details, or anything else was sent to me about the new meter. In June it was fitted which promised to be better, enabling monitoring usage, recording detailed info on heating efficiency for them to review.
Since having the G6, I was shocked to see money being deducted daily even though there was no use of heating and hot water. The new meter is suppose to show tariff, consumption/cost, usage comparison, historic comparison ect. But mine doesn't show any of that apart from
RATE 10.800p/kWh
55.440p/Day
I don't know what an average single parents energy would cost 55 pence daily adds up, over £3.50 a week. I try to top up £30, hoping to make it last but it doesn't. That's minus £7 for two weeks, leaving £23 which doesn't last a week.
Worst of all is when I top up, the money doesn't get added to my meter until the next day. But if I top up after 5.30 pm, then it cannot be added the next day, you have to wait for the day after that. If you top up Sunday or bank holiday weekend, it gets added Tuesday.
I raised my complaint, questioning charges and again requesting a breakdown, how and what is charged, what I used ect. Landlord, a charity, still refusing to budge or provide me the details. Didn't hear back from switch2, had to chase it up.
Since Sep 2015, up to today when I downloaded the app, I have paid £260. Jan to March is most expensive time.
I am more confused. I am so sorry but I have copied and pasted it, I am really sorry.


When your previous complaint was referred to our Customer Services Manager, her response referred you to Housing. Any fault reports/queries/complaints of this nature should be referred to Housing. We are only instructed to attend specific issues at their request, and bear no responsibility for the equipment beyond attending to specific jobs. F did send on your e-mail of 17 April to several people there, and our understanding was that Housing were going to contact you to discuss this further. Having spoken to them today, they tell me they have no outstanding maintenance requests & they intend to contact you to discuss any problems that are continuing soon.

2. Since Housing own the property, it is their decision to upgrade the equipment within the property. I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused by damage & have passed your comments on to Housing for rectification. They tell me they will be in touch soon.

3. Ordinarily our engineers will leave a guide on how to use the system, was that not the case here? If not then I apologise & I have put a copy in the post for you today. I have also enclosed a leaflet pertaining to our website and our app known as Quickpay, which enables payments to reach your G6 within minutes (assuming the meter is communicating with us, which yours usually does). This is only available for card payments.

4. I understand your concerns here, and would recommend you use our Quickpay app to make swifter top ups. The G6 user guide has limited information regarding expectations for payments to reach your meter, and I intend to feed this back. Please allow me to explain the system, as some of your understanding of the timelines is not quite right. I’ll ensure the process is reiterated to our call handling staff, if we have given you incorrect details.

When you make a payment to an Allpay merchant, they send details of the payments to Allpay on a daily basis. The time varies, but most of them will happen in the evening or overnight. Payments made of an evening will usually be included in this file, depending when the outlet sends the payments. If you made a payment after the file was sent to Allpay, it would be included in the next file.

Overnight, Allpay collate details of all payments made across the country to Switch2, including any card payments taken that day via the telephone system, and sends us a file at around 10.30am. This file is uploaded to our system, and the payments sent immediately to your device. Thus any payments made via Allpay on one day should reach your meter by 10.30am the next morning. We do not receive a file on a Sunday or a bank holiday, meaning that where a payment is made on a Saturday, it would be included in Monday’s file, and a payment made on a bank holiday weekend (Sat/Sun/Mon) would appear on Tuesday’s file. A payment made on a Friday should reach you on Saturday.

Looking at your own G6 payments, I can see only one which did not reach your meter the next day, which is explained by 31 August being a bank holiday (the payment having been made on 30 August). I’m sorry if this was not made clear to you. We are very keen for payments made via Allpay to reach you more quickly, we are applying pressure and we understand they are working on a solution. We are also considering alternative providers, but in the meantime we would suggest you use Quickpay, or plan your top ups in advance bearing in mind the expectations above.

5. As you know, your meter contains a standing charge of £0.5544 which will deduct regardless of usage. This cost is set by Housing, to recover their costs of administering the scheme, and applies to all prepayment units.

You have asked for a calculation of the price, by which I understand you wish to know what is taken by Housing and what is taken by us. The prices are set by Housing & we do not have a breakdown. However, I can confirm that we do not keep any of your payments; rather Housing pay us for our services separately and all monies we recover are remitted to them. The kWh rate is calculated by taking the price of the fuel running the boilers, and factoring in the overall efficiency of the system. Because heat is available on demand, most customers use far fewer kWh of heat than consumers of gas use kWh of raw energy. Each unit will cost more, but overall the cost to the end user is likely to be lower.

As for your usage, between 7 March 2012 (2789) and 6 July 2015 (18724) your consumption totalled 15,935 kWh. Between 1 August 2015 (40) and 20 November 2015 (1074) you have used 1,034 kWh of heat. Your average daily usage has therefore gone from 13.1 kWh a day to 9.3 kWh a day since the G6 was installed, though that is partly attributable to the fact that you have not yet had much winter usage since the G6 went in. Still, your usage of less than 17,000 kWh in over 3.5 years is much lower than a standard user of gas, whose average is above 10,000 kWh of gas per year for heating.
You are spending on average 58p a day more than for the duration of your time with the older unit, which is partly due to the fact Housing are no longer subsidising the running costs and instead applying a standing charge, and also due to the fact that in the early stages of your account, the kWh price was much lower. I hope this information is of some use to you. I see nothing in your meter readings to suspect a fault, though I do sympathise that you are struggling financially. The tariffs are applied at the instruction of Housing, and calculated based on actual running costs and without profit. Unless we were asked by Housing to change the prices, I’m afraid there is nothing I can do to reduce the costs of using the heating.

I have passed on your comments regarding your maintenance issues to Housing, and also asked whether it is possible for them to attend to any decoration that needs doing in respect of the re-siting of the prepayment unit. They should be in touch with you shortly.

HornetSaver

Really sorry to see this. I have zero personal experience in the area, but hope at least by replying with my thoughts I can get some sort of momentum going and someone else to respond.

My first instinct would be to contact citizen's advice if you haven't already, to clear up what your rights are. I repeat I have no experience in this area, but my energy costs are part of my rent (private rent), and I have been led to believe that the choice of supplier is the tenant's unless energy costs are included in rent. Even if I am wrong on that, they may be able to point you in the right direction on what to do next, or people that might be able to help.

My second thought would be continue to ask landlord to justify the size of the daily standing charge. If you're paying 58p a day more for energy than you used to, and the brand new daily charge is 55.4p, then clearly that's the place to start. Unless it also includes electricity then I don't understand how the standing charge could be so high (with electricity and gas together it might be about average, but they should still be able to justify it).

My third would be to bump this thread again on Tuesday if no-one else responds, because by then activity should be back to normal.

Tealady_2

Hi Hopefully you have this sorted by now but if not you need to contact your landlord to get an engineer out to service your heating system. If the radiators are only heating the top half they have an air lock in them and by using them it will cost you more as the system needs to work harder to get the heat to them. This should bring your costs down quite a lot.

At a guess the money that is coming off your meter each day even when not using heat and hot water is the service charge element of the contract you are in. To be honest compared to other schemes this is quite low and probably subsidized by the landlord. The cost of your usage over and above this for hot water should if the system is maintained properly be very low.

If you have any other questions on District Heating let me know and I will try to answer them for you as I work in this sector.