Green Energy to EDF - First Bill is massive!!!! Help Please!

Xbigman

I'm retired and my usage went from £38 a month to £41 a month when I retired, but thats for Electric and Gas. Given your BiL is heating the house from other means his electric bill should be around £30 a month. If he's paying £45 a month with a few hundred pounds arrears but he's inefficient with his electric usage then that looks about right to me. An increase to £3000 a year is clearly wrong. What may have happened is that his data was incomplete on transfer so his new provider has simply taken a generic figure for the size of house he lives in, worked out that he is underpaying because of the arrears and lumped him with a massive direct debit. 

I'd phone up and dispute this as a matter of some urgency.

Darren

[Deleted User]

Xbigman said:

I'm retired and my usage went from £38 a month to £41 a month when I retired, but thats for Electric and Gas. Given your BiL is heating the house from other means his electric bill should be around £30 a month. If he's paying £45 a month with a few hundred pounds arrears but he's inefficient with his electric usage then that looks about right to me. An increase to £3000 a year is clearly wrong. What may have happened is that his data was incomplete on transfer so his new provider has simply taken a generic figure for the size of house he lives in, worked out that he is underpaying because of the arrears and lumped him with a massive direct debit. 

I'd phone up and dispute this as a matter of some urgency.

Darren

 The OP has said that the arrears (ie; the debit balance) came from the failed supplier. A DD of £275 does not mean that EDF is assuming energy usage of £3000 per year. It is a monthly payment that EDF has set to clear the debit balance and to cover future usage. What we do not know is the end of contract date that EDF has used to come up with this figure. Clearly, if it was using 12 months from today, then the DD amount would be adjusted to cover the calculated annual cost supplier by EDF plus £50 a month to repay the debit balance. My guess is that EDF is using a much shorter repayment period. EDF could of course re-classify the debit balance as a debt and demand repayment in full within 28 days.

QrizB

Xbigman said:

I'm retired and my usage went from £38 a month to £41 a month when I retired, but thats for Electric and Gas. Given your BiL is heating the house from other means his electric bill should be around £30 a month. If he's paying £45 a month with a few hundred pounds arrears but he's inefficient with his electric usage then that looks about right to me. An increase to £3000 a year is clearly wrong.

As you've given us no information about your energy usage or personal circumstances, and we have a similar amount of info about the OP's brother-in-law, it seems a bit of a leap to get from "I pay £41 a month" to "£275 a month is clearly wrong".

For all we know, your £41 a month is based on a fixed tariff you started 12+ months ago with gas at 2p/kWh and electricity at 14p/kWh which is entirely unrepresentative of the current energy market.

Edit to add:

Looking a bit further, I see from this post that "I've a 2 year fix with Bristol energy ending Aug 2022" and you're using 3900kWh/yr of gas plus 1600kWh/yr of electricity. On a current variable tariff that would cost around £700/yr, £60/month.

TooTrusting_2

Dolor said:

Xbigman said:

I'm retired and my usage went from £38 a month to £41 a month when I retired, but thats for Electric and Gas. Given your BiL is heating the house from other means his electric bill should be around £30 a month. If he's paying £45 a month with a few hundred pounds arrears but he's inefficient with his electric usage then that looks about right to me. An increase to £3000 a year is clearly wrong. What may have happened is that his data was incomplete on transfer so his new provider has simply taken a generic figure for the size of house he lives in, worked out that he is underpaying because of the arrears and lumped him with a massive direct debit. 

I'd phone up and dispute this as a matter of some urgency.

Darren

 The OP has said that the arrears (ie; the debit balance) came from the failed supplier. A DD of £275 does not mean that EDF is assuming energy usage of £3000 per year. It is a monthly payment that EDF has set to clear the debit balance and to cover future usage. What we do not know is the end of contract date that EDF has used to come up with this figure. Clearly, if it was using 12 months from today, then the DD amount would be adjusted to cover the calculated annual cost supplier by EDF plus £50 a month to repay the debit balance. My guess is that EDF is using a much shorter repayment period. EDF could of course re-classify the debit balance as a debt and demand repayment in full within 28 days.

Thanks for your help.
The £275 a month seems to be up to the end of their annual billing period (Feb 2022). I am not totally sure of this but that seems to be what the statement is implying. What happens after then is not defined. I am hoping to negotiate a figure that still covers his current usage plus an amount on top that pays off the arrears each month, but adjusted to an amount he can manage. It is not that he doesn't want to pay at all. The current suggested £257 a month he can't manage without experiencing significant hardship as far as I can see. If they demand immediate repayment, then they would get nothing and have to pursue it through the courts, which often ends up with the debtor paying very small payments over a longer period of time (as the courts certainly seem to look at what they can afford to pay) and under Ofgem rules they seem to penalise companies that don't reasonably try to negotiate a settlement. I am hoping that EDF will look on this sensibly and we can work out a mutually agreeable arrangement. 

molerat

They will not attempt to enforce the debt through the courts but would likely go straight for a pre payment meter, either by consent or via the court, which will ensure ongoing use is paid for and the debt eventually.  When my daughter got into severe debt they insisted on £20 per week on top of the standard monthly DD to avoid a ppm.

You do though need to assemble as much information on meter readings going back.

wild666

Is the meter SMETS1 or 2? SMETS 1 meters don't give reading to other suppliers if you switch providers. If Green energy put in the meter then they should have being able to get meter readings from the meter. They've kept saying a date for them to be read by other providers than the provider that installed them but then saying a later date. My SMETS 1 meter cannot be read by anyone but BG.
If he only has electric for bathing, cooking & lighting etc. then the usage shouldn't be that high. Get him into turning off everything at the socket that isn't in use with the exception of the fridge & freezer. 

Can you get him into the habit of regularly reading the meter, daily if possible, not the IHD, if it's easily accessible for him?  If so get him into taking daily readings for a month or so and writing them down in a notebook. Then you can look at the usage, when he does his laundry that will see more kWh used in a day than the other days, especially if he has a tumble dryer.  

TooTrusting_2

Well, when we eventually got through to them and that took most the day on and off, EDF were very decent and keen to work something out. Finding a total lack of anything statement wise from GNE (online account shut down, nothing in his email and no hard copies that I could find), we had to work with the EDF initial reading and trust that was correct. 

We have managed to sort out a sensible and fair monthly payment plan that he can afford, that pays a set amount to current usage and another set amount to pay off the arrears. It was realistically the best we could hope for, it has satisfied EDF and it has set his mind at rest. I'll be getting him into better habits with regards to keeping a close eye on readings and usage, etc.

Thank you to everyone that helped with advice.

[Deleted User]

Hi,

that's good, remember to make sure to give monthly readings to supplier to avoid estimated bills in future.

molerat

Have you made sure the meter read used for this bill is somewhere close to reality ?

Need to get them into the habit of downloading and saving the on line bills - I have just looked at my files and have the PDF bills back to 2008 ! - and then looking at them to make sure they are correct.

mattojgb

Be aware of Ofgem's 12 month back-billing rule. You can't be billed for energy used more than a year ago - provided you haven't deliberately concealed its use or been obstructive - and that would hardly seem to apply to a smart meter.

So the maximum amount of arrears you can be required to pay is 12 months worth.