Estimated Gas Bill

306603

I am with Octopus energy and have underpaid the gas for what appears to be 18 months, guess I need to take some responsibility for not reading my bill correctly! My main bill only included electric charges and gas charges had disappeared all together and gas was being estimated. In mitigation the payment summary on Octopus site did include a gas payment but no indication it was estimated, my bills were also roughly correct with what I had been paying (including rises over the past few years).
Octopus have taken over a month to look into this, but I estimate I will be over a thousand in debt. The smart meter does not appear to have been taking meter readings (has taken electric readings). Is there anything I can do to portion some of the blame on Octopus, should Octopus have estimated gas for such a long period without notifying me? Should they have made me aware that my Smart meter wasn't  working? maybe sent an engineer or someone to read the meter? TIA

Reed_Richards

Nope.  You can bet that somewhere on your bills there was something to say that the gas readings were estimated.

Robin9

Yes to take some responsibility - get into the habit of reading the meters yourself and keeping your records -  then when bills come in that are obviously wrong you will be one step ahead.

Having said that I think the company probably does get daily reports of meters that have not polled overnight. and could investigate at an early stage. They did so for me  - once when the meter failed to communicate a couple of weeks after it was commissioned and secondly when it polled zero two months in row (correctly as the boiler was switched off)

BarelySentientAI

Consider asking for back billing to be applied - this is one of the circumstances that it might actually be relevant.

They shouldn't charge you for gas used more than 12 months ago unless they have already tried to charge it (like having an estimated bill that included them) or it was already covered by your direct debit or a credit balance.

Sort of.  The rules aren't that well worded.  It comes out of the duty for the supplier to get a reading from you, somehow, at least once every 12 months.

Rodders53

As above.

The meter readings on the actual Bills will state if they are from Smart / Meter Reader / Manual by Customer / Estimate against each number and date.

Glancing at a summary page on the web/app isn't the same as reading the Bill pdf as you have found out.

Do ask them to look at getting a better link between the gas and electric comms hub so that, going forward, the two talk reliably to each other (assuming the gas meter battery isn't just dead an needs replacing) as a priority?.  
Something like the Octopus Home Mini may act as a Home Area Network repeater between the two meters, I have read.