Nearly 4 years of hell!! PLEASE HELP

robertow88

pochase said:

If I understand you correctly you had huge bills on your credit meter, which you did not pay, so they installed a new prepaid meter in 2020.

On the prepaid meter you have again huge bills.

Next they change your gas meter to prepaid in 2022, you are now experiencing

Broken meters are very rare, and it very unlikely that the old and the new meter are both broken.

For the electrcity the Ombudsman has given you a £150 payment, but tha tis for the level of service, not because they believe your bills are wrong. If you want to fight them, you will not need to go to court, but they will show the decision of the Ombudsman in their favour as defense.

Emergency credit to my knowledge is £10 and not £20-£30. Are you maybe waiting weeks before you top up and it is emergency credit plus standing charges?

No so the original meter which has always been at the property is a SMET1 Smart meter which is renowned to have problems in particular with communication and they are affected by a number of things even silly things like LED lighting (look online about these). The meter was a set to credit mode from.when I moved in as normal. The readings on the bills where all incorrect (this has been confirmed by Scottish power) because on one bill it shows "Actual reading 596" months later it shows on the same date "actual reading 0" - SP confirmed this is because of a signal issue and that the meter is putting out the wrong reading. In addition to that it went from around 600 units to well over 4,000 unitis the space of a month or 2.

Because they admitted early on there was a fault even with one representative (on a recorded call which I have the audio for via subject access request) saying "it would be impossible to use that amount of units In that amount of time" I refused to pay any bills until the meter was changed, tested and bills updated with an accurate amount. However scottish power never did change the meter and have since in 2020 come out and changed the settings on the SMET1 to make it prepayment so it's still the same meter and it's loaded with a £3,500 debt which now is forcefully being paid back via each top-up that I make.

Both the Ombudsman and SP have both confirmed because of this inconsistency and incorrect meter readings the meter needs to be removed and independently tested and a SMET2 meter needs installing, they stopped installing the SMET1 meter i have in 2018 because of its faults and they no longer make them. But it's been 4 months since the Ombudsman set this resolution and still nothing SP keep asking for extensions.

With regards to Gas they came out and physically changed the meter from a classic meter to a Prepayment card meter..again SP said they are incredibly unreliable, the cards don't work, shops don't really support the cards no more and they don't advise them being fitted BUT SP don't fit the meter it's a company called Provider and they choose the one. I've had 2 replacement meters so far because 2 have been faulty and I'm on my 7th top-up card and 6th engineer visit every time the meter has been reset and reconfigured because its gone faulty. SP have said that meter needs removing ASAP and replacing with a SMET2 but it cannot be done until.the electric meter is changed to SMET2. Ref the emergency credit they've told me it'd been upped to £20 now across the country and in some cases it will take £30 which is a fault and the meter needs resetting.