Estimated bills / Broken metre

rl1991

Hi all.

Hope you are well ? 
Looking for some advise on an issue i am having with bulb regarding my bills.

When we went into lockdown myself and my partner had to work from home like many others. My job requires a lot of hardware. 6 Monitors.1 Tower and 2 tv's. These would be running 24/7. I had an agreement with my work they would cover the extra costs involved. I would give meter readings to bulb and my work would cover the extra costs. I would pay this to bulb in full to take my bills back down to £0.

This was ok until my meter display failed and wouldn't show my reading. I contacted bulb to explain the issue and they sent an engineer. He failed to fix the problem saying we would need to install a smart meter as they don't fix them anymore.(Since been told they can but don't as its cheaper to install a smart meter). I couldn't get a straight upgrade as my property is old and had pyro cables that were too small. After having both Optimum and Scottish power out to my property making upgrades I finally got my smart meter installed 4 month after the initial call to report it broken.

We called Bulb this morning to find out what our outstanding bill is, we were told that they would use estimates from the past year to work it out. This will not show an accurate representation as (as explained above), myself and my partner were at home from March 2020 - March 2021 (both working full time) We have both been back at work since mid March of this year so our usage has not been anywhere near as high. 

Since we now have a smart meter we have zero proof of our usage for the past 4 month as its been reset. If they fixed our original meter we would have been able to give a meter reading.

Our Estimated bills from March to now is £143.92 + £309.31 =£884.99 for 4 months
Our smart meter which has been in 8 days is sitting at £18.54 for both gas and electric.

To put this into perspective we used to pay £105 a month before lockdown.

This was on our last statement
"Over the next 12 months, we have estimated your personal projection: Electricity personal projection: £ 2051 Gas personal projection: £ 595"

This just seems like madness.

Any advice would be welcome. 

es5595

How long have you been with bulb? Do you have the usage for Mar 19-Jun 19?

If so, I’d response suggesting this is much closer to the correct figure and since the delay and lack-of-repair is in their court, that is what you’re offering. 

I’d add in the letter that if they disagree to issue a deadlock letter allowing you to take it straight to the ombudsman. 

Using your current usage and extrapolating back to March isn’t accurate as March/April are colder/darker than now so you’d have used more. Generally June/July will be your lowest usage months. 

Reed_Richards

You know how much electricity you used in the year before lockdown.  If Bulb uses that data to make an estimate then their estimate should be the same as that last year as they have no solid basis to do otherwise.  If they manage to estimate more then that is what your equipment used and your employer should meet that difference.