£30 per week arrears for Gas & Elec

McKneff

you cant change a supplier unless your present supplier is paid up to date and your account is clear

brysiewysie

Is it elec. If so is it a key that you credit and put into the meter? These key meters take the rate of debt repayment through the key so it should only have been changed if SP sent a specific command to your key. Your meter should have a button on it that if you keep pressing it tells you the debt and the weekly repayment rate. Sometimes these figures are only available when you have the key in the meter and press the button.

Let me know if that works or not. If not can you provide any more info?

SwanJon

Agree with the above.
Did you check that the meter was recovering the debt before, or is this the meter starting to do it now?

For some reason it can take a while for the message to get to the meter.

spiro

UtilityMan wrote: »

Hi MP

It's a combination of debt and consumption for next 12 months so balance zero's.

My guess is the offer is for 12 months, if not then definitely needs to be spread over 12 months.

The £31 can only be the debt reclaim, the consumption for the next 12 months has to be paid for every time you vend. As you say it for for both fuels then I guess they will be reclaiming something like £15 per meter. Even if you take the £5 mention elsewhere in this thread thats still a minimum of £10 over 2 meters.

kianella

brysiewysie wrote: »

Is it elec. If so is it a key that you credit and put into the meter? These key meters take the rate of debt repayment through the key so it should only have been changed if SP sent a specific command to your key. Your meter should have a button on it that if you keep pressing it tells you the debt and the weekly repayment rate. Sometimes these figures are only available when you have the key in the meter and press the button.

Let me know if that works or not. If not can you provide any more info?

cheers for the advice, they had taken it upon themselves to charge me £15 a week to pay off the debt i owed, when it should only have been £5. The key had activated it on friday morning when i topped it up, it was then charging me £2 a day without using any power!!!! Funnily when i called them they sent a guy round within 2 hours to reset the meter, although they had tried to get me to put in £5 over 3 different days to reset the key , to which i informed them i wasnt rich!!!!! result......:T

greenbee

I have a feeling that there is a statutory amount that suppliers are entitled to collect towards debt (something like £3.50/week) but that may just be an urban myth, so don't quote me... check with EnergyWatch/CAB, and anything over that is with your agreement.

Presumably you want to pay it off as soon as you can, and not have it hanging over you forever (after all, if you pay it off, you can switch ), so work out what you can afford and try to get them to agree to this, and also ask them how you can make one-off payments to contribute to the payment if you find you have some spare cash. If you seem willing, they'll probably be more flexible.

Remember, the meter collects debt even when you aren't there, so if you run the meter down before you go on holiday, you may find your top-up on your return gets swallowed up paying off the debt due while you were away.

While you're paying off the debt, work out how to keep your consumption down - you may be able to reduce it by the amount you are paying, which should make it less painful.

get_me_out

Scottish Power will try it on, they did it on me was set at 5.00 then 2 wks into prepayment THEY upped it to 15.00. I rang them and they said it was error and will go back to 5.00 after 3 sep top ups on 3 different days BUT had to be done at same shop.

BRITISH GAS will set it at 15.00 UNLESS you on pension credit OR income support.

kianella

Hiya all, I am contacting you again in the hope that someone knows how I can complain about scottish power. Back in August scottish power took it upon themselves to reset my prepayment meter with a charge of £15 per week even though it had been agreed I would repay £5.50 a week, as my previous post. Well this morning I have recieved a letter saying that the meter will be reset at £15 per week again, even though after last time we agreed on £5.50 a week again. My big arguement is that if the £5.50 had been deducted each week since i was forced to have the meter installed back in May a big chunk of the debt owed would have been repayed now, instead nothing has been reclaimed at all. They also forced me to have a gas meter installed on the same day, yet this has been gradually reclaiming the debt owed to them since day one, also when I switched to them they said they could save me money & I paid via direct debit for a full year before they informed me i was in such debt.I cannot contact them myself as I only have a mobile phone & no credit on it (last time it cost me way over £10 in calls before it was sorted out) Please can someone help as if i am forced to pay £15 off the debt each week I will really struggle to feed my two young children.

aligerdie

I have been told that I have to pay £15 per card (gas and electric) per week when our meter is installed.

£30 per week before I pay for my energy is ridiculous, and I am currently writing a very strongly worded letter of complaint after receiving awful customer service from their helpline.

Some excellent helpful people on here told me to escalate my enquiry to a complaint, either by letter or on the phone, and it should get sorted.

I was told this was a rate we could afford as my husband works. He'd probably earn more on benefits bizarrely, so it seems strange for them to assume we have oodles of spare cash!

Good luck negotiating, I think you need to get in touch asap and mark your letter in bold with COMPLAINT. That way they have to deal with it.