We'd like to remind Forumites to please avoid political debate on the Forum... Read More »
Energy Bills and Energy Ombudsman decisions: When to give up?
Hey all, created an account to ask for some advice here.
I'll apologise from the outset for what is likely to be a very long post. I'm months deep into trying to manage an issue here so there's a lot of information to try and encapsulate.
Below I'll provide subheadings for the Current Issue, a breakdown of the Full Background, today's outcome with the Ombudsman, and my specific questions that I'm looking to explore.
Current Issue:
I'm several months into a dispute with a previous energy provider over the accuracy of my final bill. A negative Ombudsman decision was reached today but it was largely based on a lack of evidence provided by the supplier. I'm not sure if/how I could contest things any further from here.
Full background:
1. Bought my first home in Dec 2019, moved in in Jan 2020. Property is a fairly small flat with no gas, electric only.
2. Scottish Power were the existing energy supplier. Didn't bother comparing others, just left it as it was. First few months had bills in the £80-£100 ballpark.
3. After a few months started receiving physical letters describing another account set up in my name at a different property nearby with a similar address. Other property has duel fuel gas/electric supplies. My bills more than double to £200+.
4. Takes ages to get customer services to sort it out.
5. Bills never go back down from the £200+ ballpark, I spent months after that experimenting with the heating, lighting, and appliances to no avail. At this point have my oven turned off at the mains, fridge/freezer at minimum settings, heating only on for a few hours each day, and half my wardrobe is thermals, thick socks, hoodies and ponchos. I'm obsessive about turning off lights that I'm not using, and mostly use small lamps or candles in the evenings. no other major devices or appliances other than my computer to work from home, my TV+xbox at weekends, and the four storage heaters which are only on intermittently each day. Policing use of any/all of these things never seem to put a dent in the bills. Friends and family joke that I either have a secret drug farm, or crafty neighbours tapping my supply.
6. Early 2021, I start getting prompted to increase my monthly direct debits to £300-£350 for electricity supply to my flat.
7. Customer service is absolutely grating, staff are rude and unhelpful. Every time I ask them to help investigate my problem they just reiterate to me that all they can do is take my payment over the phone. Research on scottish power forums, news articles, and independent review sites & consumer forums show a major trend in scottish power complaints all revolving around a theme of inaccurate usage/billing/address data, very high bills, and unhelpful support services.
8. Switch my supply to Octopus around March/April 2021. Scottish Power final statement produces a £900 final bill initially, which then gets replaced with a £1400 final bill after my final meter reading. This is not from any unpaid past bills mind you, I've been paying them every month. This is in addition to having already paid £200+ per month for the majority of my 13 months with them. I'm certain this is not fair usage for my flat, and they've consistently refused to help investigate in any way, so I start looking at options to open a complaint case and contest the bill.
9. Complaint case gets very little meaningful engagement and most support staff are condescending and snide, either suggesting that I google for advice on debt management, or only now begin to tell me how they *could* have helped me back when I was a valued customer but that they *obviously* won't be doing that if I've closed my account. After weeks of effort managing a complaint case via Resolver I manage to get someone relatively useful from a specialist 'resolver complaint handling team' to look at the account, who confirms seeing two eletricity meters and one gas meter listed for my supply address, suggesting that this is maybe an administrative error from when they merged the records following the previous account mix-up. He agrees something is amiss and says he'll investigate further and call me back.
10. Never hear from that person ever again. Future attempts to follow up with him are initially met with other call handlers at least acknowledging evidence of an issue and promising to chase him for an update on his investigation the first couple of times that I call. But eventually different call handlers just start denying that those additional meters were *ever* listed against my supply address and denying the existence of any case notes suggesting otherwise.
11. Scottish Power become almost completely unresponsive. Even automated emails get my supply address wrong and are just generic 'we'll investigate further an update you later' shpeel signed off with "Sincerely, Customer Service Representative".
12. Start seeing similar growth of bills with Octopus too (initially quoted £32 a month as an estimate based on the size and age of my flat and my answers to consumption questions). So I describe the problem to Octopus customer services, they instantly agree something is wrong and get things in motion to arrange an accuracy check on my meter. Also specifically tell me that these meters typically reach end of life after 15-20 years and records indicate that mine is over 18 years old.
13. Escalate Resolver case to Ombudsman to continue trying to get the Scottish Power final bill reviewed and hopefully cleared while I work with Octopus to investigate meter health concerns in parallel.
14. Throughout the Resolver and Ombudsman complaint procedures Scottish Power do not engage at all. Zero comms, zero evidence submitted. Only exception is a brief phone call followed by a formal resolution offer via the Obmudsman platform, where they suggest that I should agree to pay them in full on a payment plan and they'll agree to a £50 goodwill gesture on account of the poor customer service. I rejected that.
15. Two possible problems in my mind at this stage: Firstly; Scottish Power's accounting data sounds really unreliable with clear precedent for overcharging customers and clear evidence that they have at some point merged my account with another one. Second; my bills with octopus are continuing to spiral in the same way, suggesting a problem with the meter may also be in play, but at least Octopus have been forthcoming in trying to acknowledge and investigate that, where Scottish Power denied any possibility for problems and just demanded to be paid.
16. Polled my neighbours who live in identical flats within the same building. Some were not home, but the ones I spoke to all paid roughly the same as my original bills, reporting a range of £80-£140 a month, even with some of them being on more expensive pre-payment key systems.
17. By early May, still no news on this meter accuracy check after well over a month. However this has to be organised via a 3rd party rather than being something Octopus do themselves, so despite chasing things via Octopus customer services several times now I'm consistently not hearing anything back from them other than confirming that the request is raised and the engineers at this other company will get to it when they get to it. Also get it confirmed that Octopus have told the 3rd party that the outcome of an ongoing Ombudsman investigate will depend on this check.
18. Ombudsman case handler called me today to explain that Scottish Power have attached zero evidence or comments to the case. And that while the evidence and (very verbose) comments that I've provided do show problems and failures in my favor, he cannot ask an energy supplier to forgive such a large bill when there's not sufficient evidence to *prove* that the final bill is inaccurate. Any argument based on how unlikely it is for a small flat with my usage habits to generate £200+ monthly energy bills or amass a £1400 final bill on top of those monthly bills is "just hypotheticals" and they can't make decisions based on that.
19. He tells me that if I had *not* switched suppliers (which would have meant spending the past 3 months continuing to pay Scottish Power's suggested £350 a month) then he could ask Scottish Power to help me check the meter accuracy and then adjust the bill accordingly. But otherwise there's just not sufficient evidence here to suggest that the bill is inaccurate, and Scottish Power no longer have any obligation to investigate because I closed my account with them.
20. He reminds me repeatedly that the Ombudsman is an impartial service and that I should consider how much money it also costs Scottish Power to pay their staff and pay the Ombudsman for dealing with my complaint.
21. Explained to him that while I understand what he's saying, it sounds like there's nothing I can actually do myself to provide a sufficient level of evidence to support my claim of inaccurate billing. The only people with that data showing the inaccurate meters on the account and previous notes confirming the presence of a problem are Scottish Power. So I can't get adequate evidence unless they actually engage with us and be transparent and forthcoming with their data. By stonewalling both me and the Ombudsman Scottish Power are able to ensure that there's never sufficient evidence for the ombudsman to decide in agreement with me, which feels like a rather unfair way of completely side-stepping the situation if they're not obligated to provide any evidence confirming what I'm saying, have provided no evidence to the contrary, and so they just win by default?
22. Ombudsman man reiterates again that he's impartial AND he can only make decisions based on the available data AND he cannot keep the case open for however long it would take for this accuracy check to get sorted out AND he cannot instruct Scottish Power to help at all since I'm not their customer anymore AND even then they'd probably have a hard time investigating because of covid so they might not even be able to do that AND even if a meter check from Octopus did reveal a fault then I'd just have to take that up with Scottish Power separately at the time once I have that information and ask them to reimburse me later.
23. Honestly a little shocked that this was the "impartial" feedback. Any time I tried to talk about the major disconnect between my real-world consumption habits and my meter readings/bills he'd just cut me off and insist that that's just "hypotheticals" and he can't factor that into the decision. But then any time we got onto the topic of Scottish Power's complete lack of engagement and failure to investigate my reports of a problem leading to me closing the account, he'd rattle off about 50 "hypotheticals" about how they're probably just really busy and its expensive to pay staff and covid stuff would have made it hard for them to investigate anyway.
Outcome as of 5pm yesterday:
Ombudsman will be formally submitting their decision that I should agree to a payment plan to pay Scottish Power the full ~£1400 final bill, and will be requesting that Scottish Power consider a larger goodwill gesture of £150 instead of £50.
My main gripe with this is that Scottish Power completely ignored the problem, complaint, and investigation at every point, they've barely engaged at all to even acknowledge the situation. Meanwhile I've put almost daily time and effort into making my case for months, and yet at the end of the day things I lose specifically because they didn't lift a finger to provide enough evidence to support or refute my claim.
My questions to the forum:
1. I presume if I want to contest the Ombudsman's decision too then I need to go a legal route? but I have no idea what to expect there in terms of who I need to speak to or how much time it could take or how much more that could cost me. Anyone able to manage my expectations in that regard?
2. Do any other people here have similar recent experiences with Scottish Power? If so how did your case end?
3. Does anyone here know who this 3rd party is who does the meter accuracy checks or if there's anything else I can to do escalate my request? I'll call Octopus again tomorrow to see what they can suggest on that front too.
4. Is it actually possible for this to be legitimate usage? I cannot think of anything else in my home that could be consuming any significant amount of energy that I'm not already quite aggressively policing. Anyone here able to suggest anything I might've overlooked or any method for reliably tracking consumption per device?
5. Brass tacks: Should I just give up and cough up £1400, then recentre my efforts around assuming there's definitely just a problem with the meter and/or my appliances/comsumption? Or are there still reasonable courses of action that I'd be leaving unexplored?
I'll apologise from the outset for what is likely to be a very long post. I'm months deep into trying to manage an issue here so there's a lot of information to try and encapsulate.
Below I'll provide subheadings for the Current Issue, a breakdown of the Full Background, today's outcome with the Ombudsman, and my specific questions that I'm looking to explore.
Current Issue:
I'm several months into a dispute with a previous energy provider over the accuracy of my final bill. A negative Ombudsman decision was reached today but it was largely based on a lack of evidence provided by the supplier. I'm not sure if/how I could contest things any further from here.
Full background:
1. Bought my first home in Dec 2019, moved in in Jan 2020. Property is a fairly small flat with no gas, electric only.
2. Scottish Power were the existing energy supplier. Didn't bother comparing others, just left it as it was. First few months had bills in the £80-£100 ballpark.
3. After a few months started receiving physical letters describing another account set up in my name at a different property nearby with a similar address. Other property has duel fuel gas/electric supplies. My bills more than double to £200+.
4. Takes ages to get customer services to sort it out.
5. Bills never go back down from the £200+ ballpark, I spent months after that experimenting with the heating, lighting, and appliances to no avail. At this point have my oven turned off at the mains, fridge/freezer at minimum settings, heating only on for a few hours each day, and half my wardrobe is thermals, thick socks, hoodies and ponchos. I'm obsessive about turning off lights that I'm not using, and mostly use small lamps or candles in the evenings. no other major devices or appliances other than my computer to work from home, my TV+xbox at weekends, and the four storage heaters which are only on intermittently each day. Policing use of any/all of these things never seem to put a dent in the bills. Friends and family joke that I either have a secret drug farm, or crafty neighbours tapping my supply.
6. Early 2021, I start getting prompted to increase my monthly direct debits to £300-£350 for electricity supply to my flat.
7. Customer service is absolutely grating, staff are rude and unhelpful. Every time I ask them to help investigate my problem they just reiterate to me that all they can do is take my payment over the phone. Research on scottish power forums, news articles, and independent review sites & consumer forums show a major trend in scottish power complaints all revolving around a theme of inaccurate usage/billing/address data, very high bills, and unhelpful support services.
8. Switch my supply to Octopus around March/April 2021. Scottish Power final statement produces a £900 final bill initially, which then gets replaced with a £1400 final bill after my final meter reading. This is not from any unpaid past bills mind you, I've been paying them every month. This is in addition to having already paid £200+ per month for the majority of my 13 months with them. I'm certain this is not fair usage for my flat, and they've consistently refused to help investigate in any way, so I start looking at options to open a complaint case and contest the bill.
9. Complaint case gets very little meaningful engagement and most support staff are condescending and snide, either suggesting that I google for advice on debt management, or only now begin to tell me how they *could* have helped me back when I was a valued customer but that they *obviously* won't be doing that if I've closed my account. After weeks of effort managing a complaint case via Resolver I manage to get someone relatively useful from a specialist 'resolver complaint handling team' to look at the account, who confirms seeing two eletricity meters and one gas meter listed for my supply address, suggesting that this is maybe an administrative error from when they merged the records following the previous account mix-up. He agrees something is amiss and says he'll investigate further and call me back.
10. Never hear from that person ever again. Future attempts to follow up with him are initially met with other call handlers at least acknowledging evidence of an issue and promising to chase him for an update on his investigation the first couple of times that I call. But eventually different call handlers just start denying that those additional meters were *ever* listed against my supply address and denying the existence of any case notes suggesting otherwise.
11. Scottish Power become almost completely unresponsive. Even automated emails get my supply address wrong and are just generic 'we'll investigate further an update you later' shpeel signed off with "Sincerely, Customer Service Representative".
12. Start seeing similar growth of bills with Octopus too (initially quoted £32 a month as an estimate based on the size and age of my flat and my answers to consumption questions). So I describe the problem to Octopus customer services, they instantly agree something is wrong and get things in motion to arrange an accuracy check on my meter. Also specifically tell me that these meters typically reach end of life after 15-20 years and records indicate that mine is over 18 years old.
13. Escalate Resolver case to Ombudsman to continue trying to get the Scottish Power final bill reviewed and hopefully cleared while I work with Octopus to investigate meter health concerns in parallel.
14. Throughout the Resolver and Ombudsman complaint procedures Scottish Power do not engage at all. Zero comms, zero evidence submitted. Only exception is a brief phone call followed by a formal resolution offer via the Obmudsman platform, where they suggest that I should agree to pay them in full on a payment plan and they'll agree to a £50 goodwill gesture on account of the poor customer service. I rejected that.
15. Two possible problems in my mind at this stage: Firstly; Scottish Power's accounting data sounds really unreliable with clear precedent for overcharging customers and clear evidence that they have at some point merged my account with another one. Second; my bills with octopus are continuing to spiral in the same way, suggesting a problem with the meter may also be in play, but at least Octopus have been forthcoming in trying to acknowledge and investigate that, where Scottish Power denied any possibility for problems and just demanded to be paid.
16. Polled my neighbours who live in identical flats within the same building. Some were not home, but the ones I spoke to all paid roughly the same as my original bills, reporting a range of £80-£140 a month, even with some of them being on more expensive pre-payment key systems.
17. By early May, still no news on this meter accuracy check after well over a month. However this has to be organised via a 3rd party rather than being something Octopus do themselves, so despite chasing things via Octopus customer services several times now I'm consistently not hearing anything back from them other than confirming that the request is raised and the engineers at this other company will get to it when they get to it. Also get it confirmed that Octopus have told the 3rd party that the outcome of an ongoing Ombudsman investigate will depend on this check.
18. Ombudsman case handler called me today to explain that Scottish Power have attached zero evidence or comments to the case. And that while the evidence and (very verbose) comments that I've provided do show problems and failures in my favor, he cannot ask an energy supplier to forgive such a large bill when there's not sufficient evidence to *prove* that the final bill is inaccurate. Any argument based on how unlikely it is for a small flat with my usage habits to generate £200+ monthly energy bills or amass a £1400 final bill on top of those monthly bills is "just hypotheticals" and they can't make decisions based on that.
19. He tells me that if I had *not* switched suppliers (which would have meant spending the past 3 months continuing to pay Scottish Power's suggested £350 a month) then he could ask Scottish Power to help me check the meter accuracy and then adjust the bill accordingly. But otherwise there's just not sufficient evidence here to suggest that the bill is inaccurate, and Scottish Power no longer have any obligation to investigate because I closed my account with them.
20. He reminds me repeatedly that the Ombudsman is an impartial service and that I should consider how much money it also costs Scottish Power to pay their staff and pay the Ombudsman for dealing with my complaint.
21. Explained to him that while I understand what he's saying, it sounds like there's nothing I can actually do myself to provide a sufficient level of evidence to support my claim of inaccurate billing. The only people with that data showing the inaccurate meters on the account and previous notes confirming the presence of a problem are Scottish Power. So I can't get adequate evidence unless they actually engage with us and be transparent and forthcoming with their data. By stonewalling both me and the Ombudsman Scottish Power are able to ensure that there's never sufficient evidence for the ombudsman to decide in agreement with me, which feels like a rather unfair way of completely side-stepping the situation if they're not obligated to provide any evidence confirming what I'm saying, have provided no evidence to the contrary, and so they just win by default?
22. Ombudsman man reiterates again that he's impartial AND he can only make decisions based on the available data AND he cannot keep the case open for however long it would take for this accuracy check to get sorted out AND he cannot instruct Scottish Power to help at all since I'm not their customer anymore AND even then they'd probably have a hard time investigating because of covid so they might not even be able to do that AND even if a meter check from Octopus did reveal a fault then I'd just have to take that up with Scottish Power separately at the time once I have that information and ask them to reimburse me later.
23. Honestly a little shocked that this was the "impartial" feedback. Any time I tried to talk about the major disconnect between my real-world consumption habits and my meter readings/bills he'd just cut me off and insist that that's just "hypotheticals" and he can't factor that into the decision. But then any time we got onto the topic of Scottish Power's complete lack of engagement and failure to investigate my reports of a problem leading to me closing the account, he'd rattle off about 50 "hypotheticals" about how they're probably just really busy and its expensive to pay staff and covid stuff would have made it hard for them to investigate anyway.
Outcome as of 5pm yesterday:
Ombudsman will be formally submitting their decision that I should agree to a payment plan to pay Scottish Power the full ~£1400 final bill, and will be requesting that Scottish Power consider a larger goodwill gesture of £150 instead of £50.
My main gripe with this is that Scottish Power completely ignored the problem, complaint, and investigation at every point, they've barely engaged at all to even acknowledge the situation. Meanwhile I've put almost daily time and effort into making my case for months, and yet at the end of the day things I lose specifically because they didn't lift a finger to provide enough evidence to support or refute my claim.
My questions to the forum:
1. I presume if I want to contest the Ombudsman's decision too then I need to go a legal route? but I have no idea what to expect there in terms of who I need to speak to or how much time it could take or how much more that could cost me. Anyone able to manage my expectations in that regard?
2. Do any other people here have similar recent experiences with Scottish Power? If so how did your case end?
3. Does anyone here know who this 3rd party is who does the meter accuracy checks or if there's anything else I can to do escalate my request? I'll call Octopus again tomorrow to see what they can suggest on that front too.
4. Is it actually possible for this to be legitimate usage? I cannot think of anything else in my home that could be consuming any significant amount of energy that I'm not already quite aggressively policing. Anyone here able to suggest anything I might've overlooked or any method for reliably tracking consumption per device?
5. Brass tacks: Should I just give up and cough up £1400, then recentre my efforts around assuming there's definitely just a problem with the meter and/or my appliances/comsumption? Or are there still reasonable courses of action that I'd be leaving unexplored?
0
Comments
-
I'm not sure if you have the records to do this, but throughout your entire list of complaints I see no mention that you have ever checked the meter readings and verified that the meter on your bill is actually your meter...Focusing on the money doesn't help resolve this type of problem, you need to be looking at exact usage and making sure that you are supplying meter readings from the correct meter and that meter number matches your bill.5
-
In regards to the Ombudsman, give up before you even start, just go the small claim court route instead. The Ombudsman is totally useless and is paid for by the energy companies, so is beholden to its paymasters. Don't bother wasting your time with them.
2 -
Welcome to the forum.With all due respect, you'll never get very far with complaints that are longer than War and Peace, it'll just be TL;DR. You need to list only the main facts, not a blow-by-blow account of 1001 shenanigans. You need to prune it down to about a tenth of the wordage. One sentence will suffice for the comments about poor customer service.You haven't mentioned kWh even once, so that's probably part of the problem. You need to do a meter sanity check, especially if the meter is external to the flat: turn everything off at the main switch (preferably at a busy time shortly after dark when everyone is using electricity) then watch the meter for a few minutes and make sure the red light marked 1000 Imp/kWh never flashes once. (If no light, watch the disc spin.) Then turn absolutely everything on and make sure the light flashes rapidly. By plugging in just one high power item such as a 3kW kettle you can get a reasonable idea whether the meter is accurate just by counting the flashes.If things don't match up, look at the neighbouring meters: the one allegedly yours may be supplying someone else.Any dispute about overcharging really needs to be distilled down to something like 'Opening meter reading was X, closing reading Y, therefore Z kWh used over D days, so the bill should be £P including the daily charges and VAT. However, bank statements show I've paid £Q so you owe me a refund of £R.'If you start using emotion, saying usage is unreasonable or comparing usage with others it won't cut the mustard. Just stay with Facts, Facts, Facts and keep it Short, Short, Short.5
-
-
Having gone down The EO route, your future options are limited: pay up or go down the legal route. The latter may prove to be problematic as the supplier has the right to use The EO’s investigation as part of its defence and, if a Court finds in the supplier’s failure, you could end up paying their legal fees.
All suppliers have to agree to a meter check with the default position being that they will raise a charge if no fault is found.1 -
You'll get little sympathy on this forum if it turns out you weren't actually reading your meter and thereby comparing the estimated readings on your bills with actual readings. I don't think you were doing that but I gave up reading before I got to the end of your post.Reed3
-
You're right, sorry for that. To clarify; Yes the meter reads match with my meter, and the meter on the bill is actually my meter.MWT said:throughout your entire list of complaints I see no mention that you have ever checked the meter readings and verified that the meter on your bill is actually your meter...However the basis for my complaint is that I believe that the meter itself is compromised and I've had a real hard time with actually getting that investigated. The figures I've recorded consistently on my meter are around 200-300 KwH per week, always 1000+ per month, to give an approximation.
More or less aligns with my experience but I've no idea how to approach the idea of engaging the small claims court. How exactly does someone do that and what should I expect in terms of costs and commitments? I don't have a frame of reference for the size of the claims commonly considered there, is it worth doing for a £1400 bill?wakeupalarm said:In regards to the Ombudsman, give up before you even start, just go the small claim court route instead. The Ombudsman is totally useless and is paid for by the energy companies, so is beholden to its paymasters. Don't bother wasting your time with them.
Yeah fair cop. I'll have a look at trimming things down when I can, I drafted most of this during a period of peaked frustration and was trying to summarise 6+ months of narrative.Gerry1 said:With all due respect, you'll never get very far with complaints that are longer than War and Peace,
Thanks, I'll do this.Gerry1 said:You need to do a meter sanity check, especially if the meter is external to the flat: turn everything off at the main switch (preferably at a busy time shortly after dark when everyone is using electricity) then watch the meter for a few minutes and make sure the red light marked 1000 Imp/kWh never flashes once. (If no light, watch the disc spin.) Then turn absolutely everything on and make sure the light flashes rapidly.
By plugging in just one high power item such as a 3kW kettle you can get a reasonable idea whether the meter is accurate just by counting the flashes.If things don't match up, look at the neighbouring meters: the one allegedly yours may be supplying someone else.
This is probably my fault for the length of the post, but your example doesn't align with my problem in a way that I can benefit from. I totally agree with what you're getting at, but it's a solution to a different problem to the one that I have.Gerry1 said:Any dispute about overcharging really needs to be distilled down to something like 'Opening meter reading was X, closing reading Y, therefore Z kWh used over D days, so the bill should be £P including the daily charges and VAT. However, bank statements show I've paid £Q so you owe me a refund of £R.'I'm not suggesting that the meter being used is the wrong meter or that SP have calculated those reads incorrectly, I'm saying that the correct meter's real reads are just not accurate.
My real world usage habits feel quite a bit more conservative than average, yet I see bills of £200-£300 a month.
This is what I'm getting (slowly) organised via Octopus. But Scottish Power wouldn't budge an inch when I was asking them to do it. All they'd tell me is "either I can take your payment or I can refer to the national debt advice line".Dolor said:All suppliers have to agree to a meter check with the default position being that they will raise a charge if no fault is found.
0 -
Brad990 said:I'm not suggesting that the meter being used is the wrong meter or that SP have calculated those reads incorrectly, I'm saying that the correct meter's real reads are just not accurate.
My real world usage habits feel quite a bit more conservative than average, yet I see bills of £200-£300 a month.You need facts, not feelings: not much point in wasting money on a meter test unless you have good evidence to show that it really is inaccurate.IF the meter sanity test shows that the meter with the serial number shown on your bill is not actually yours, or IF it is recording usage when there is none, or IF it is flashing too rapidly with a known load, then go ahead with a meter test. But otherwise it'll be clutching at straws, and the fee for the meter test means that your debt will be even bigger.Rely on your head, not your heart. Once again, think kWh not ££.2 -
Meters over-reading actual consumption virtually never happens. Your assumption has likely cost you thousands because, in all likelihood, there has been something consuming that energy.
You can test the meter accuracy yourself very easily by doing as suggested above: turn absolutely everything off at the consumer unit and ensure the meter is not moving at all; then turn on just the sockets, un plug literally everything then switch on a heater with a know power to the maximum setting and leave it running for exactly 1 hour. A 1.5kW heater would add around 1.5 units to your meter in 1 hour.
I strongly suspect that you have something like an immersion heater left on permanently or your electric heating is using loads of power. 1000kWh per month is roughly a constant 1.4kW draw. That's what my EV uses to trickle charge.
It would definitely help you to track down the problem if you get an energy monitor of some kind so that you can see what's being used in real time and track usage over a few days.
There are some other unlikely possibilities like incorrect wiring meaning you're also paying for someone else's usage but this would become apparent if you took the advice here.
Stop complaining and take responsibility. Find out what's going on then you can at least save running up future big bills.2 -
Brad990 said:
You're right, sorry for that. To clarify; Yes the meter reads match with my meter, and the meter on the bill is actually my meter.MWT said:throughout your entire list of complaints I see no mention that you have ever checked the meter readings and verified that the meter on your bill is actually your meter...However the basis for my complaint is that I believe that the meter itself is compromised and I've had a real hard time with actually getting that investigated. The figures I've recorded consistently on my meter are around 200-300 KwH per week, always 1000+ per month, to give an approximation.Incorrect readings on an electric meter are excruciatingly rare, unintended consumption on the other-hand is worryingly common.Follow the suggestions already given to narrow down where the consumption is, and for your own sanity do one of the tests suggested, to satisfy yourself that the meter is accurate.
2
Confirm your email address to Create Threads and Reply
Categories
- All Categories
- 349.7K Banking & Borrowing
- 252.6K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
- 452.9K Spending & Discounts
- 242.6K Work, Benefits & Business
- 619.4K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
- 176.3K Life & Family
- 255.6K Travel & Transport
- 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
- 16.1K Discuss & Feedback
- 15.1K Coronavirus Support Boards