Scottish Power manweb

mhoc

Not sure where to put this, it nearly ended up on the Vent boad but instead a little praise is now due.

Just been having a nasty week for bills which started with Sky demanding extra money. The I had a look at the home phone bills over the last six months and realising that our calls costs which use to be about £3 or £4 a month have jumped to £25 a month since my daughter had her phone stolen and went back on PAYG. The thumb screws are out as we speak to try and extract the extra costs off her!

The final straw this morning was the annual estimate from Scottish Power Manweb. We pay by direct debit monthly and once a year we get an estimate of our annual bills and the DD is revised accordingly.

We had been paying £78 a month, which was reasonable seeing as there are 5 of us including 3 teenagers and endless numbers of computers/laptops and energy sucking gadgets - no gas so only one fuel bill.

The new monthly payment was due to rise in August to £106.50, a shocking extra £28.50 a month. That worked out at £342 a year which is almost as much as the cottage costs us for a week in the summer.

I didnt think that there was much point in it but I rung them up anyway. The chaps first explanation was that it was possibly because there was a balance brought forward from the winter bill but this was only £140 and all the other bills had been in credit.

So the chap asked me to read the meters again and then went off to check how much electricity we had used over the last year. Turned out we had used £833.11 of electricity.This worked out at about £70 a month so the DD of £78 was more than sufficient.

(the estimate said we would use £1135.31 over the next year!)

So he thought that there must be a glitch somewhere in the system, possibly due to earlier estimated bills and he has manually altered it so our DD stays at £78.

So the moral of the tale is read your bills as they come in the door and dont be afraid to query them if they dont look right.

Mary