British Gas Website

CRANKY40

If I login to my new accounts I'm informed that I'm now on the new system. The new system shows my gas with a credit balance and my electricity with a debit balance instead of the dual fuel system. My direct debit which should have gone out this morning has been wiped off the face of the earth. I checked with my bank and I no longer have a DD set up with British Gas. 

I cyber chatted with a nice man this morning who said that it should all be sorted by the 13th of January and I can either make an extra payment or leave the charges to be absorbed. Of course if I don't make a payment this month I won't get the government energy rebate....... There's not a snowball's chance in hell that I'm sending any money just now. I suppose it's "wait and see" until the 13th. 

brewerdave

BG's "algorithms" are useless at calculating future requirements ! By my reckoning/spreadsheet, I need to pay ~ £123pm for my electricity only account WITHOUT allowing for an increase when my fix ends in June 23. They wanted £89pm !!
 I increased my DD to £103 BUT they are still nagging about overpaying - according to them I'll have a credit balance of over £100 by the next Dec. review - on which planet ?

Dad_Deep_Pockets

British Gas are without doubt the number one reason people get into energy debt, their website is useless, in fact no worse than useless.
I have always been on top of my bills, and check everything on a monthly basis - its a by product of my job :-) We used to be with Peoples energy and before the energy crash we were paying £90 per month. We are low gas users but quite high electricity users and have always had dual fuel. Obvs Peoples energy went bust, as did most edge suppliers - and we were moved to BG.
Our Direct debit went up to £150, not unexpected and not unaffordable. This has slowly risen to £220 which again is not unexpected and is still affordable for me. 
I have worked it out and on our usage and the current cost of energy £220 pm works out at our annual spend. Imagine my surprise that when I logged on this morning to check British Gas had reduced my direct debit to £80 pm for dual fuel. Now this is totally ridiculous and is the sum of an absolutely awful website with usage algorithms made up on the back of a fag packet. All this would do is build up a massive debt and result in even higher DDs to equalise the account before the annual review. I now know why some people end up in such a mess. If they are struggling with money how tempting is it to accept the £80 pm as the 'experts' at BG have suggested it so why not? Well, why not is because it is entirely false and this will cause untold issues. Please. please, work out your annual spend and divide by 12 to at least have a sensible amount for a DD as British Gas seem unable to add 2 and 2 at the moment. Needless to say I put mine back up to £220 and funnily enough the system came back saying end of plan balance 0.00 - so if £220 led to a zero balance in Nov 23, how could £80 pm do the same? British Gas the maths of a dyscalcic.

BooJewels

I've had the same issue with BG for many years, they perpetually under-estimate my usage and DD.  As soon as I get any kind of credit built up (the threshold seems to be about £200), they refund everything over one months DD amount back to me. 

Even though my bills show my annual usage and it's a smidge higher than actual usage, they don't seem to use this to calculate my DD.  So the way I've managed it is to put any refunds aside in a savings account and keep a note of how much it is in total and whenever I get a bill that gives rise to a debit balance, I pay it off from this balance I've kept aside - did so last week.  The next few DD payments (the max they'll let me put it to, which is too low at £100pm) build a credit and the next bill will probably be a bit more than that, so I pay the difference.  By warmer months, they'll start giving me back my credit, so we start over.

But I'm on top of my usage and work out every month what that has cost me - and I find it confusing, so if this is happening much wider amongst their customers who aren't as interested as me, it really must be causing people difficulty.  And don't get me started on their billing intervals - I can see no pattern to it whatsoever.  I wrote the dates of bills down for 2022 and there were 7 of them, ranging in interval from 3 weeks to 5 months.

I'm also managing a dual fuel account for my aunt under an LPA and they asked me to submit meter readings as her smart meters have seemingly stopped sending them and they've been billing on estimates.  The electric reading was 41kWh less than their last estimate (understandable as she's been in hospital for over 2 months) - and they're currently showing her Consumption as 99959kWh for a 5 day period in December - assuming that she's gone round the clock, rather than just using less.  Interested to see if that appears on her next bill or some sort of plausibility check picks it up first!  That's going to be an interesting conversation.

I'd actually venture to comment that I now think their system is unfit for purpose as a consumer supplier.  I can't see how their new system is any improvement on the old one.

crw49

It was bad enough in the "olden days" when you waited for your quarterly bill to arrive, who at British Gas thought that anyone would be pleased to change from monthly to six monthly billing? To make it worse they don't seem to know the meaning of "Balance", my bank takes credits and debits to give the balance but my balance with BG is the amount paid in since the last bill and now where do I find the cost of what I've used? - no help at all.
The app that is currently being rewritten, so unusable at the moment, was, for me, unusable anyway since somebody decided that my smart monitor was too old and would no longer be read by the app. It also takes forever to get into to then be told it isn't working.
Setting up a new web system in the middle of an energy crisis was not clever. The parts of the old site that I found useful, last reading and usage graphs, have gone and nothing helpful remaining. They managed to forget my gas direct debit and seem to have forgotten that I have a gas tariff. My "smart" monitor tells me that my gas tariff is zero so my cost is nil.
In the readings section of the monitor it seems to have started reading the electric total on the meter not the Rate 01 that has been used for the past 3 years (in the "How to read your meter" section of the website my black-top electric meter isn't featured).
BG took my electric direct debit as soon as they could in January but have not yet credited my account with the Government payment, probably too busy trying to fill the hole they've dug.

John1963

Similar issues to others, my experience follows.

• Direct Debit: We were with Peoples Energy paying £129 per month, the British Gas DD settled at £493(!), which did seem high. Now on the new system and DD adjusted to £237. without explanation.  I guess this is likely to be right'ish, however can't be sure because of the failure to explain and the following. 

• Energy Usage: I haven't been able to see gas usage for months but now can't see electricity usage either.  British Gas tell me they are sorting but can't/won't give a date when all will be fixed; this is far from helpful.

• Smart Meter: We have one but British Gas need to update, they are getting readings but I can't get a display or use the app to get readings/check usage.

It all seems very amateurish; I'm amazed that the media have not picked up on the issue with usage information because I'm told it a major issue that affects all customers.  It has to be wrong to blindside customers like this when it's really important that we are able to keep track.

Have other experience to same?

Gerry1

John1963 said:

I haven't been able to see gas usage for months but now can't see electricity usage either.

Just read the meters on the wall.  Multiplying the metric gas meter usage by 11.2 will be near enough to get kWh.

alicef

I'm beginning to think I'm living some form of Groundhog day with BGas and how they handle smart meter readings.

I've recently had my SMETS1 swapped with a SMETS2 meter.  On my recent statement the closing SMETS2 meter read for 15th Jan is labelled '- you gave us your meter reading'...WHAT?  Is this a BGas euphemism for a SMART reading?   I haven't supplied any readings for the new meter.

Also the closing read is too low.  

Surely it is important that BGas can distinguish between customer reads/estimates and smart meter reads?

John1963

Gerry1 said:

John1963 said:

I haven't been able to see gas usage for months but now can't see electricity usage either.

Just read the meters on the wall.  Multiplying the metric gas meter usage by 11.2 will be near enough to get kWh.

Thanks, if only it was that easy, I was used to seeing the cost per day and hour and found this really helpful.  I would read the meters but it's a pain.  

John1963

John1963 said:

Gerry1 said:

John1963 said:

I haven't been able to see gas usage for months but now can't see electricity usage either.

Just read the meters on the wall.  Multiplying the metric gas meter usage by 11.2 will be near enough to get kWh.

Thanks, if only it was that easy, I was used to seeing the cost per day and hour and found this really helpful.  I would read the meters but it's a pain.  

All sorted, I have managed to get daily/hourly readings for the last 12 months, for gas and electricity using the Loop energy monitoring app.  It was really easy to set up the communication with the two smart meters and then after a couple of days everything is now showing.  I just need to enter tariff details and I'm there.

It is a shame that British Gas couldn't do the same, but there you go.