First time home owner - Gas & Electric problems

AndyWilmot1

Hello, I was just wondering if anyone could help with my situation at the moment.

We bought a new build, literally finished weeks before we moved in around September 8th 2015. Just after Christmas we got a letter from British Gas explaning they needed a metre reading so we provided them one. This is when the problems started.

We were £300 in credit at this time, however once we got a response we were -£800 in debit. This put our payments up to £147 a month. We enquired about this assuming we were using too much electric, we were confused because the heating had been turned off for weeks & we do the usual turning plugs etc off. This was around March time.

They told us that infact this was just gas as it was only gas set up, the electric direct debit had only been created in March. We had not contacted them at this time and had always had electric, so now we are -£200 in debit, paying £52 a month. So at this time we are paying £197 a month for gas & electric.

I keep getting passed from pillar to post getting no answers so i decided to contact them via twitter. The response i got was this:

"The total gas usage from September to April was £647.55 thats £71 a month approx and a DD is a percentage of what you owe and also predicted usage for the next 12 months. Because your usage has been fairly high and your property is a new build the DD is higher because we have no history to base the estimated usage on.

Once we have more actual reading over even 6 months well be able to see what your DD needs to be inline with your usage"

I genuinely dont know how our gas usage was that high, the heating has not been on since we found out the cost of the bill and before that was on a timer for around 2-4 hours a day maximum if it was freezing. The boiler also broke for 2 weeks during this period.

I dont want to get british gas out to check the meter as its a further £250+ if nothing is wrong and we just dont have the money for that. We have been taking regular readings and its not changing much everyday.

My question is, is there anything at all we could do about this? It feels like we are being conned for trying to progress with our life and do something positive like buying our own home. Any information or advice would help, i would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

Cardew

Welcome to the forum.


Rather than talking about how much you are paying - the important factor is the consumption in kWh; you could be paying for all the consumption before you moved in.


Did you check your meter readings on the day you moved in, and give those readings to BG?