How long can an electric company not issue a bill due to a meter reading dispute ?

MWT

nurquhar said:

That's as may be but OFTM did not tell me who the existing supplier was or suggest there was an obligation to contact them. I request to take over the supply with OFTM before we took possession on the 21st.

Sadly that is still the mistake, it is not their obligation to tell you what to do, they are going to assume you have an account with the existing supplier and proceed with a switch.

It does seem crazy that nobody in the chain of agents/solicitors etc. involved in getting new people into a property seems to believe they have any responsibility for telling people how to correctly take control of the various services (electric/gas/water)

molerat

nurquhar said:

MWT said:

nurquhar said:

We don't know the existing supplier, we bought the property from a trust in IoM which is administered by a bank there. Even the agent who sold the property and has managed it for the last 10 years does not know the supplier. The bill was paid by the bank directly in IoM.

You have been poorly advised, the existing supplier is a matter of record and can be found easily online or with a phone call and by not registering with them first you have ended up where you are now.

That's as may be but OFTM did not tell me who the existing supplier was or suggest there was an obligation to contact them. I request to take over the supply with OFTM before we took possession on the 21st.

Which is where it all started to go wrong I am afraid.  You need to find out who the incumbent supplier was, surely the trust administrators will know who they were paying, and contact them to sort out the account for the short period prior to OTM taking over. It may well be that the trust have been blindly paying estimated bills for the past 10 years.

MWT

... I would start with E.On as their name is all over the meters and see if that is where it was before...

nurquhar

MWT said:

Thanks for the photos, lost of clues there that the previous supplier was probably E.On. Not certain though.

The difficulty is that if the previous supplier has a confirmed meter reading of 41693 it suggests that there has been a lot of electricity used while it was supposedly 'empty' and the meter has gone around the clock back to zero at some point...

Hopefully though it is just an estimated reading as they were getting no readings while it was empty.

After googling I found the number for the power distributor who was able to identify the previous supplier, EON.

Tried ringing them, nightmare trying to get past the Robot who answers the phone on 0345 052 0000, he seems fixed in the idea that you must have an account number, even if you are a prospective customer. After confusing him to heck he eventually gave up and put me the phone queue. 20 minute later I get to speak to a real person. After telling her the meter reading story she puts me on hold for 10 minutes to go an talk to another department to find the answer, then drops the call. Back to square one....

MWT

At least you are now talking to the right company and should be able to get it cleared up even it is takes a few phone calls....

leonj

You need to stop the direct debit right away

nurquhar

I resolved the issue with the crazy reading. I gave up waiting for Out Fox The Market to step up to the plate and sort it out. I used the helpful info provided on this thread to track down the previous supplier. So I rang EON Next and after the usual long, long wait I got to speak to them about the problem, initially they were dis-believing saying they had no record of any reading dispute against my meter number. After a bit persistence the guy became a lot more helpful and agreed to look into the issue and clear any dispute if I sent him my photo of my meter reading.

An hour later he rang me back and he agreed that there 10 year projected forward estimate was bonkers and he was going to close the dispute !

Wow, a utilities CS rep ringing you back and sorting things out in one go... Thumbs up to Tristan at EON Next for great service.

Not so impressed with OFTM who spent 10 weeks failing sort something out I was able to do with one phone call and one email. They expended more energy fobbing me off saying they were working on it than it took to resolve it...

For even more cheek they just responded to one of my messages from a few days ago claiming 'THEY' had resolved the issue... Can you believe it??