No meter reading for almost a decade...

matelodave

In the whole great scheme of things, if they send you a bill with an estimated reading, then its up to you to get it corrected, either by asking them to read the meter or doing it yourself by sending in a reading.

Just leaving it in the hope that it might sort itself out or, even worse, that you might get away with not having to pay for it all is really not a solution.

Your big problem is, that with all the ups & downs of tariff changes over the past few years, neither you nor they, have any idea of how much you used at which tariff. Which leaves you wide open to them making estimates of your consumption skewed towards the higher tariffs, especially as they were over the winter periods.

I suggest you start saving furiously in anticipation of a ginormous bill and send them a reading. You should be able to look at your last bill to see what they guessed and check it against the present reading which would give you some idea of the discrepancy in consumption.
However you'll not easily be able to work out how much it will cost as it will probably be apportioned over the various tariffs in the period since they last had an actual reading.

Its never ever a good idea to let things slide as it can come back and bite you and unless you've kept copies of all your bills you cant backtrack to see where it may have gone wrong. Sending in monthly readings and checking your monthly statements should mean that you should never have a problem that is more than a month old.