Octopus Energy Shocking Practice

ellador

Sorry for the long message; can they get away with this?
Having bought an electric car back in September 2020 and switching to Octopus GO. I religiously charged my car on a (recommended) Ohme charger linked to the Octopus Go tariff with a smart meter supplied by Octopus between the hours 00:30 to 04:30 to benefit from the lower tariff. My money was taken on DD every month for both Gas & Electricity; I recently moved in October this year and sent them pictures of the meter readings and asked to transfer my account to the new address which they have done. I have now just received a bill for over £1000 saying they missed some invoices in 2021!. I queried the bill as it says that the tariff is "flexible" Octopus and my tariff should be "Go" Here is their response:-
"Hi Mat,
Thank you for getting in touch,
Unfortunately, as Octopus Go is a smart beta product we rely on half hourly readings to bill to. As we are missing these from your account we have been unable to bill you to Octopus Go, this is mentioned in our terms and conditions of Octopus Go which I will link below
Hope you have a great day,
Love and Power,
Rachel 🐙
Energy Specialist"
So for over a year I have been blindly charging my car only between 12:30 & 4:30 am only to be told that it is irrelevant and I need to pay the flexible very high tariff regardless. Even though the Go tariff had been working fine previously... needless to say I am utterly devastated! Please beware everyone...
Can they do that?

[Deleted User]

Yes they can do that. All energy contracts have terms and conditions. 

When 30 minute usage is being received, Octopus Energy provides you with a monthly statement showing the tariff that you are on with daily single page summaries, I struggle to see how you could have failed to notice that your meter wasn’t sending 30 minute readings as the loss of just one dataset stops monthly billing.

Had you brought the problem to Octopus Energy’s attention they would have attempted a manual data pull.

Mstty

Have you got any proof of charging during the specifies times?

Logs from the EV or download the bright app and get your historical data? Is this in the ohme app?

Is your usage not shown in half hourly slots on your Octopus user page(not a customer so can't say for sure it should be)

niktheguru

Did you not look at any of your bills at any point to see you weren't being billed at a lower off peak rate? The direct debit amount is irrelevant!

Keep_pedalling

As a Go customer I really can’t understand how you missed this was happening. Every month you get an on line bill breaking down your usage in half hour time slots if everything is working corr3ctly. 

SecretSanta1973

Interested in whether Ellador at the top of this post got it resolved from the issue 6 months ago. I have a similar issue.

The T&C actually say “based on typical consumption patterns” which I have interpreted to mean a typical ratio of On or Off peak for an EV user (which you have to be to be on Go). It is a brief set of T&C and very ambiguous.

if there is factual evidence from the EV charger of charging at certain times of the day and factual evidence of meter reading A and B between two points in time, that should give a value that is the maximum the customer should be asked to pay. Octopus shouldn’t profiteer from their own weak technical systems falling down.

Some of the above replies suggest the customer gets invoices and should be checking this themselves - actually they get an email alerting you to an invoice, but if the DD looks reasonable and the customer has a very busy life with some more pressing problems it should be down to Octopus to spot a problem and alert the customer. We have too many things to keep an eye on nowadays, personally I have about 300 online passwords for different things and some of these are bigger issues than my energy bill.

bristolleedsfan

SecretSanta1973 said:

 - actually they get an email alerting you to an invoice, 

I get email stating  "Full PDF bill attached"

powerful_Rogue

Same here.

DougMLancs

We have too many things to keep an eye on nowadays, personally I have about 300 online passwords for different things and some of these are bigger issues than my energy bill.

Given how things have been over the last 12 months, I would’ve thought most are watching their energy bills like a hawk!

JohnPo

I think the OP has a point, that from my experience Octopus are not proactive in informing the user that there is problem with the smart meter readings. Where readings have stopped for me  (the App or the online account tells you by having no data) I have had to take the initiative to contact their customer services to get the process started of getting it fixed and getting them to pull the missing data, at least once they had to send an engineer out to pull the 100amp fuse and wait 20 minutes before powering up again.

I believe the meter stores the data for up to 6 months, so really they should always be able to catch up so long as the meter can be reconnected, but it does require someone to proactively chase it.

mmmmikey

Octopus make it perfectly clear when you sign up that some of their tarriffs are beta tariffs and may go wrong sometimes. It is spelt out to you that if they don't get data you'll revert to an SVR. You have easy access to very clearly presented information and it only takes seconds to scan through your monthly bills.

If you've approached this a bit too casually, not understood what you have signed up for and/or taken your eye off the ball and not looked at your bills for ages you're certainly not alone and I do sympathise with you. But to be fair to Octopus they already do far more than other suppliers in many respects and I really think you just have to take this on the chin, accept that the mistake is yours and take steps to keep track of things better going forward.

I can see that in normal times it would be very easy to lose track, and  I understand your argument about having a busy life, but you can't have failed to know that energy costs have gone through the roof. In these circumstances, I really do think that if you haven't taken the time to understand and check your bills you have nobody to blame but yourself.