Explain my meter to me please

coconutcurls

I had 14p on my pre-payment meter.
I topped up £10. 
In my simple head logic: now I have £10.14. 
But the amount shown straight away was £9.85. 

What am I missing? 

rp1974

At a vague guess the standing charge amount,possibly?.
Exact details will depend on your supply area.

The_Fat_Controller

What is your daily standing charge ?

Could that have been taken off the balance immediately ?

LindsayT

Could be standing charge as others have said. Also any appliances being used at the time.

coconutcurls

Sorry, still not getting it. Always when topping up I get the full amount + whatever was there straight away after the top up is done regardeless what whatever appliance is on. I was not on emergency credit either. 

[Deleted User]

There are two options that the other posters were trying to explain:

1.  You were actually using something at the time and didn't notice, so you got charged for that bit of electricity used (although 29p is a bit high for that).

2.  The meter took the daily standing charge (a bit like meter rental) from your credit as soon as you put it on.  This is often about 30-50p per day, but I don't know any that are actually 29p right now.  You might not have seen it happen before because it had either already taken it earlier that day, or took it later in the day.  It might even be that it tried to take it earlier, but because you didn't have enough credit it couldn't (so took it as soon as possible).

macman

How about telling us your unit rate and the standing charge?
The debit is 29p, so almost certainly the daily s/c.

stewie_griffin

Sounds like standing charge. There wasn’t enough credit left on your meter to cover the standing charge so it’s waited for you to top up to collect it.

coconutcurls

I didn’t know about standing charge (just moved to this house, always had direct debt for gas/eletricity before). So standing charge basically means that I rent my meter?

[Deleted User]

coconutcurls said:

I didn’t know about standing charge (just moved to this house, always had direct debt for gas/eletricity before). So standing charge basically means that I rent my meter?

The standing charge covers a number of things that we all have to pay for which includes your meter. It also includes paying for the maintenance of the Grid that gets the energy to your property; green taxes; the cost of supplier failures and social initiatives such as Warm Home Discount; support for heat pumps etc.

macman

Meter reading, billing and the emergency service...all fixed overheads.
When you had a credit meter before, you still paid standing charges-just look at your old bills. They're not exclusive to PPM tariffs.