Bulb 💡 Ripped off

baronmaroni

Hi, I thought I would post this as it might be of interest. Been with bulb for a few years and they have been fine, before they went into admin I had a smart meter fitted.

Last year around July 2021 the actual electric meter stopped working, reported to bulb who could tell based on some tests that it was indeed dead. The said they would arrange an engineer and let me know the date, roll on August I get an email to say engineer is booked for May 2022.

I tried to rearrange and I could have a worse date, nothing sooner, bulb continue to charge me based on estimate, which I felt were high £240 pm for electric and gas roll on May 2022 the engineer replaces the meter and I asked him can you take the data off it as I want to know that I have paid the right amount. He tells me no can do. Guess how much my bills have been since the new meter, around £135 pm. The but that really has me annoyed is bulb recalculated the bill after all this, and said of yeah you owe us £300. I have no idea why. I already complained a week ago and heard nothing, so onto round two tomorrow 

Mstty

Regardless of being in Special Administration they must have a complaints procedure.

Have you started this?

MWT

baronmaroni said:

I tried to rearrange and I could have a worse date, nothing sooner, bulb continue to charge me based on estimate, which I felt were high £240 pm for electric and gas...

So your gas meter was still working, or at least you were reporting the meter readings?

Rather than just looking at the total monthly payment which isn't really much of a guide, deduct your actual metered gas use from the amount you have paid, so you know what you have paid for the estimated electricity use, then use the same time period for a prior year to get the kWh used and calculate what that would have cost at the rates you have paid over the estimated period.

Once you do that you will know if you have a complaint or not, and you'll have the numbers to back it up...

WillPS

Don't bother with support via email - it gets routed to some remote contact centre and the quality of service is abysmal.

Twitter chat has yielded the best response for me with them, although despite the fact they actually got as far as agreeing compensation at the beginning of June in my case, I have now escalated the matter to the Ombudsman because they've more or less ghosted me. I would diarise to do the same if I were you.

baronmaroni

Thanks for the advice on diarising, will try this and twitter, the meters that they fitted were the new type and they both packed in, first the electric then a few months later the gas, the readout was just the serial number and no way to get the info. Also I found the card the meter guy left with a reading of old meter of N/A so some how bulb just made up a number that meant I owe them money lol 

MWT

baronmaroni said:

... so some how bulb just made up a number that meant I owe them money lol 

So you get to calculate your own reasonable version of the consumption based on previous years, and apply the various prices to that and see how it compares to the Bulb version...

Keep in mind that you had price rises in April '21 just before all this kicked off, and again in Oct '21 and April '22, so you'll need to take that into account...