British Gas Meter Readings

mgfvvc

I am on the MSE collective tariff with BG and my bills have been underestimating my gas usage for some time.

I tried to submit meter readings when I first noticed this, but I consistently got errors from the website and I think I tried to submit a reading over the phone and that didn't work either. Although they kept sending me emails saying "We’re sorry about this and are working on fixing it now." it's still not fixed, more than 6 months after it first happened. I also tried to submit readings over the phone and failed. Trying again today, as soon as I entered my first reading it dropped out with a "please contact us in office hours" message. Eventually I decided to let it ride for a while, but, with the tariff coming to an end, I would like to rectify it.

Has anyone else had problems submitting meter readings?

I have now contacted them about this and I am waiting for a response.

mgfvvc

British Gas have said

"I'm sorry you're unable to submit the readings online. This is because we've estimated your account to the readings of ***** for gas and ***** for electricity on 5 August 2017. The estimated reading for electricity is higher than your actual reading of *****. Thats why you were unable to submit the reading online."

That's very shoddy as far as I am concerned. They should be able to handle an actual reading that's lower than an estimated reading. If that's beyond their technical competence they should at least give a meaningful error message. Failing that, if they send out an email telling me they are looking at the problem, they should actually look at it and let me know the result.

Cardew

I suspect the problem is with the automatic bills instantly produced by The All seeing, all knowing computer.

When I enter a reading on-line - with a reading higher than the previous entry - it instantly calculates my account balance; obviously this is all done without any human intervention.

If I inputted, and it was accepted, a reading way lower than the previous entry it would calculate I had a large credit balance. The computer would then automatically send me a refund if my credit balance was above a set figure.

mac.d

Phone them up during office hours and speak to a customer adviser. There's usually a built-in margin of error so if you try to give the computer a reading that is far above or below what it expects your reading to be, it will reject it. All suppliers do it, and I think it's more to try and protect against people transposing numbers and giving wildy inaccurate readings more than anything else.