British Gas quadrupled my bill

victor2

Robin9 wrote: »

Use your email address and get her monthly bills sent to you in future.

Also get permission to speak to BG on your mothers behalf.


While you are at it look at her insurances, water and phone bills.

Wrong thread?

[Deleted User]

I would agree with Energy Twist in that its a rebilling due to an incorrect annual usage details in arranging such a low direct debit of £48 a month.
There is a possibility that they have been billing transposed day and night readings and have been presented with new readings and attempted to reclaim the debit without advising you why

[Deleted User]

Sounds like you've only been there since March this year? What did they base your initial DD on?


As has already been said, you need meter readings to calculate what you've actually used.

Robin9

victor2 wrote: »

Wrong thread?

Whoops yes

savemoney

The fix bit is the unit price you pay for x amount of time. It doesn't mean you pay fixed DD payment because your usage may go up and down or in your case hugely up. You been paying way below what you should have, and you use a huge amount given we not even at time of year heating is much in use

GeorgePowerFinch wrote: »

I'm not sure? We were told our Tariff was fixed and if wee were ever going over our usage they'd let us know, they haven't said anything in the last 6 months about going over apart from today.

victor2

GeorgePowerFinch wrote: »

I'm not sure? We were told our Tariff was fixed and if wee were ever going over our usage they'd let us know, they haven't said anything in the last 6 months about going over apart from today.

You probably appreciate (now at least) that a fixed tariff is a fixed rate per kWh of energy you use, not a fixed charge regardless of your usage.
BG review direct debit amounts every 6 months, so they've done that and made the adjustment, as your actual usage has been much higher than what you were paying for. They are now hoping to cover the debit balance you've built up plus your ongoing usage.
There would almost certainly have been a note on your last statement headed "Your payments have changed" or similar. You can adjust your direct debit amount on your BG account website, but there are limits to how much you can change it by.
How was the initial DD amount arrived at, did you guess your annual usage, or did they base it on some other information you provided? Either way, it was pitifully low.

RelievedSheff

I have just checked our British Gas charges per kwh and standing charges. Not sure what tariff you are on so not sure if these will be similar to yours or not but for a comparison our tariff is as follows:

13.83p per kwh
20.37p standing charge per day

So based on these units and your monthly usage you would expect a standing charge of £7.19 per month plus £69.15 for 500kwh which equates to £76.34 per month.

Now you would need to bear in mind that this is based on your summer use so you would want to be paying more per month to build up a reserve to use over the winter months.So a monthly payment closer to £110 per month would be expected and this doesn't take any account of paying off the debt that you have previously built up. To clear this in a reasonable time you may end up at closer to the £200 per month British Gas suggested.

Gerry1

This article should be a sticky, it's amazing how so many people don't understand Fixed Direct Debits.

Most of these problems wouldn't arise if Ofgem made Variable DDs the default.

matelodave

Gerry1 wrote: »

This article should be a sticky, it's amazing how so many people don't understand Fixed Direct Debits.

Most of these problems wouldn't arise if Ofgem made Variable DDs the default.

The article seems to major on getting overpayments back or reducing DD amounts whereas 90% of the problems that get flagged up on here are from those who are under paying and then getting ginormous top-up bills or large increases in their DD's.

IMO the intro should explain in words of one syllable (or even less for some on here) how DD's work, how estimates work, how bills work, how to understand and check them them and how meters should be read and how often readings should be sent to the suppliers.

victor2

Gerry1 wrote: »

...
Most of these problems wouldn't arise if Ofgem made Variable DDs the default.

Agree in part with that. Effectively having standard "PAYG" style tariffs might reduce the number of this type of problem. Meaning those who make the effort to select a fixed monthly DD tariff will only benefit from a fixed cost throughout the year - assuming it is realistically set in the first place.
The downside is you would then get many more stories of people who can't afford to heat their homes in the winter. Of course they won't have saved up money in the summer months to cover the winter costs, which is effectively what monthly DD payments do.
OFGEM should at least ban the "winter loaded" tariffs a number of suppliers now offer. That defeats the most basic principle of monthly DD payments.

I fondly remember as a child venturing into my gran's cellar to put a coin in the gas meter. Don't even want to think what coin it would be, possibly as much as a shillling! :rotfl: