My British Gas 'SMART' gas meter died so I cant give a reading, what are my options?

_SwiftNick_

The meter worked fine for a few months, then stopped sending readings on the 29th of Feb (as many did), so I reported the fault. BG told me it was a network issue and they are working on it...

My last manual meter read was 3 months ago, at some point between then and now, the battery in the 1 year old gas meter died. I only discovered this yesterday when getting an up to date reading before the price hike.

An engineer is coming out to repair/replace the meter in 3 weeks.

What are my rights in terms of getting a fair charge for my gas usage?

BG have no idea what my usage is, no idea how much was used before the price hike, and no way to find out!

I doubt I'm the only person with this predicament as the 'network issue' is causing many smart meter batteries to go flat way ahead of the target 15 year lifespan.

Brie

What BG is most likely to do is to assume how much you use monthly and charge you for that.

Now they might take what you used in July, August & September & now October last year (which to my mind might be fair) or more likely use 1/12 of your annual use for each of those months.  This, I would argue, is not fair as obviously you aren't using as much gas or electric in the summer as you do in the winter.   I would suggest that you look at your past bills to see how much you used last year and work out how much you believe you should pay and see how close BG are to that amount.  

I've had this same discussion with my provider though fortunately for me the period since the last manual reading was much shorter.  Add to that we were actually on holiday for a portion of the time when the meter was likely not working so I have been told that that period will be ignored. 

Our other plus (of a sort) was having come home from holiday we discovered there was no hot water.  And then when we tried to cook something that there was in fact no gas at all.  Because (I think) we are registered as a vulnerable household they had someone out to swap the old meter for a new one within about 4 hours.  Not 3 weeks. 

I don't how old our meters are/were as they were in place when we moved in 6 years back.  Likely less than 10 years but didn't always work "smartly".  But now that the gas meter has been replaced I'm told that the electric one will need to be replaced too - even though it's still working.  No time line of that yet and it's been about 6 weeks since the gas one was sorted.  

Swipe

On the plus side, it was a very mild September and October last year so you could be quids in if they base it on that.