Faulty electric meter

SparklySEB

Hello there!
This my first post on this forum.
We live in a detached house. Not massive. There's only the two of us. I work from home - on a computer, and my husband is retired. We extended our house in 2008 and had a new meter put in. Over the last 10 years we've had horrendously high electricity bills . Have been with probably four different energy suppliers in that time. I've lost count of the amount of times I've called these energy suppliers to find out how our bills can be so high . I've checked and rechecked with them that Ive been reading our meter correctly. I've been assured that I have been.
We came over to ovo last November having been impressed with good reports. My Direct debit has crept up and up from £116 pmonth and when we were told we needed to pay £179 a month I decided to have an OVO smart meter fitted. I just couldn't see where that figure was coming from and I wanted to closely monitor our usage. It was installed 3 weeks ago and our old meter was taken away. We didn't cut back on electric as we really wanted to establish where we've been going wrong.
The smart meter is telling me that so far this month my bill will be £30! When I look more closely at my previous statement to when we had our old meter it says we used 2098 kWh.in the space of one month! So far this month weve used 123 kWh. I've come to the obvious conclusion that the meter we had for 10 years was faulty. Can someone please advise me as to what I can do about this? The old meter was taken away by the ovo fitter. Clearly we've overpaid big time over the last decade.

jk0

Sounds like you were reading tenths as full units, doesn't it? Was your old meter mechanical with a red wheel on the right?


Not much you can do about it now I guess.

[Deleted User]

Was your old meter an old analogue meter with six small rotating dials ?. These are known as "dial " meters.
Even though you say you have been reading your old meter correctly if you had one of those old meters it is so easy to get it wrong The 10,000 kwh dial is very slow moving and the pointer barely moves every year.
The Iskra electro mechanical meter was installed throughout the UK with the 10 nths of a unit not separated properly from the other 5 digits and this meter caused havoc with expensive mis reads.
Watch out with your new meter from Ovo. Their meter is a bit stupid too with a hard to see decimal point separating the tenths of a unit. first seven digits count ,not the eighth

Skools_Out

SparklySEB wrote: »

Hello there!
This my first post on this forum.
We live in a detached house. Not massive. There's only the two of us. I work from home - on a computer, and my husband is retired. We extended our house in 2008 and had a new meter put in. Over the last 10 years we've had horrendously high electricity bills . Have been with probably four different energy suppliers in that time. I've lost count of the amount of times I've called these energy suppliers to find out how our bills can be so high . I've checked and rechecked with them that Ive been reading our meter correctly. I've been assured that I have been.
We came over to ovo last November having been impressed with good reports. My Direct debit has crept up and up from £116 pmonth and when we were told we needed to pay £179 a month I decided to have an OVO smart meter fitted. I just couldn't see where that figure was coming from and I wanted to closely monitor our usage. It was installed 3 weeks ago and our old meter was taken away. We didn't cut back on electric as we really wanted to establish where we've been going wrong.
The smart meter is telling me that so far this month my bill will be £30! When I look more closely at my previous statement to when we had our old meter it says we used 2098 kWh.in the space of one month! So far this month weve used 123 kWh. I've come to the obvious conclusion that the meter we had for 10 years was faulty. Can someone please advise me as to what I can do about this? The old meter was taken away by the ovo fitter. Clearly we've overpaid big time over the last decade.

You can't accurately extrapolate the energy you have used over 3 weeks during high summer to the energy you used over the last year, let alone the last 10 years.

But in answer to your question, as you no longer have the meter you have concluded was faulty after 10 years of what you considered were inaccurate bills, there is nothing you can do about that now.

Look to the future, not to the past

Robin9

Is your smart meter actually working in smart mode ? or are you doing your own readings ?

If so, as has been said above, make sure you are reading your meter correctly - some of them can be difficult to read. Particularly watch out for the decimal; point.