G&E Bill of £916 for 18 day Period from SSE - I could cry

jackalnapes

Just looking for some advice here because this whole situation has been stressful and I'm at a loss about how to best address this.

We (my partner and I) moved into a rented property on the 13/10/2018 and decided to switch supplier for gas and electric straight away after we used a comparison site. We started the switch with Lumo, gave SSE my details so they could bill us for the period up until the switch.

I'm not sure how the follwoing even relates to this bill because it's outside the period mentioned but still i'll briefly mention it. This whole thing was a nightmare. We continued to get bills from SSE even after the switch was complete. I asked them to stop sending the bills and they said the switch wasn't complete, but when I talked to lumo, they said it was. Lumo said "I dont know why they are fighting this, they should be able to see on the national database that you're with us". I passed that message along to SSE who said they checked the national databse and we are with them.

I got back on to Lumo and submitted a bunch of photos of the meter etc, turns out there is two electric supplies coming from the house and they took over the wrong one??? We didn't know of course and I've never heard of this. Lumo put us in credit for the amount we've been paying them for electric even tho they haven't been supplying it, and we were told to pay SSE for the electric we have been using. So we did, we got a bill from them, we paid the £50 or so it was, and we're just waiting on a final bill to cover the few weeks before the actual switch happened (28/02/2019).

We got the final bill today and it is for the period 20/10/2018-07/11/2018 so an 18 day period and they want £916.77!!!!!!! This is obviously a shocking amount. We are two people living in a small 2 bedroom house (it was actually a one bed but the landlord put a wall up). There is literally no way we could have used that much.

I'm finding this whole thing very stressful, I already have one CCJ (I stupidly forgot to update my license address and got a parking fine I didn't pay. My brother lived in the house I used to but didn't pass the mail on to me.) It's taken a fair amount of time to get into a half decent credit score again after that CCJ for literally £150 and now I'm worried I'll end up with another for this even though I feel I've tried to do everything right.

Do I contact SSE and tell them this is an outrageous amount and can't be right?
Do I tell Lumo that their incompetence switching has caused this?

How can they possibly expect people to pay this much?

D_M_E

Some of this could be related to the address - you say the property was split in 2, does each bit have a separate address, such as 100A Any Road and 100B Any Road?

The £916 could be a bill covering both properties.

Also, is it an estimated bill or actual based on actual readings and, since it is so much, does it show details of both meters?

You need to WRITE to both companies and head your letter COMPLAINT and detail your saga, particularly to SSE then if nothing done escalate to Ombudsman after 8 weeks.

EDIT - Does each property actually have its own meter, or does one of them have a sub meter which is being fed by the original meter of the property before it was split in 2?

molerat

venison wrote: »

Have you got readings for the two dates? If you can't resolve this contact "ofgem"

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk

OFGEM do not deal with consumer complaints and the ombudsman, the correct channel for consumer complaints, will not deal with the matter until the supplier complaints procedure has been exhausted.


As for the problem, you need to locate all meters for the property. Is this a split property or is it a single property with linked MPANs ? What tariff are you on with SSE, is it a total control tariff for when the property used to have electric heating ? Did you take meter reads when you moved in ?