Bills

I went through 3 months of misery telling nPower that my bill was too high. And every time I was treated like a moron, who didn't know what he was talking about. Despite providing them with payment history, and meter reading history.
It's a 2 way street. There are plenty of times the energy companies get it wrong. And they do not like to admin they are wrong.

Yes it will go wrong sometimes, theres no stopping it, thats why you keep track of your own usage. If the adviser you get through to is a complete idiot only speak to managers and don't back down, do not accept "we will call you in a few days" etc or any kind of shifting the blame/delaying, sit there till the manager sorts it, its quite easy to look through the readings and payment history in a few minutes and find any discrepancys. Helps if you know what you are talking about as-well, I had to sort my parents nPower bill out a few months ago, I just told the agent what to do and how to fix it, was sorted within the hour.

The majority of the time though its the customer who is at fault and refuses to accept they have used the energy and you have to sit there being polite while they are shouting/swearing down the phone till they either accept it or hang up.
 
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Easily done if you are lazy and have lots of electrical gadgets etc.

There are just two of us and our bill was £2000 per annum.

Best of it was we didnt get a bill for 13 years and then finally got one for £27k :O

By then the ruling had been made that they could only go back one year so they had to settle for £2k and then I got three years to pay that back over :)

If I had known we were going to get 13 years free electric I would have started a business from home which involved heavy electric use.

Imagine the mining you could've done :eek:
 
Paying by monthly direct debit would have allowed this to be picked up much earlier. Why doesn't everyone pay monthly DD, much better than getting a yearly bill?

Electric companies are lazy and still dont come and read the meter even if you pay via monthly dd...............
 
Not everything is a reason to look down on other people who have busy lives and get through them by abstracting based on previous experience. Unless, I suppose, you are especially looking for reasons to leap on a thread and exclaim how you can't believe people don't check their metre every month. Which is pretty sad.

Busy lives and can't take 2 minutes out of ~43,000 every month to read a couple of numbers to make sure you aren't under or over paying? :rolleyes: God forbid some people like to accurately know how much their outgoings are every month and not rely on estimates. Zero sympathy for laziness when a higher than expected bill lands on your door step because of your busy life.

British Gas even contacted me two weeks ago when I entered a number wrong to query how we used so much through July.

But to actually answer the question of...

I posted asking what other people paid / used

4 bed detached house, £45/mo on electricity, British Gas (just moved to Ovo this month), one person working from home every day.
 
You should get a timer for you immersion heater, 30mins in the morning before you wake up and 30mins in the evening when you get back from work. If the tank is covered with a insulation or a blanket it should retain enough heat for the whole day.

Before I moved my flat was all electric and I had an immersion heater but I turned it on and off by hand, my bills were on average £40ish a month over a year but that was on an economy 10 meter.
 
The majority of the time though its the customer who is at fault and refuses to accept they have used the energy and you have to sit there being polite while they are shouting/swearing down the phone till they either accept it or hang up.

Are you the CEO of nPower? :p

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...ers-contempt-for-customers-STILL-goes-on.html

Ofgem estimates npower’s billing meltdown, which apparently surfaced after the company introduced a new IT system in 2011, affected more than 500,000 customers between September 2013 and December 2014.

Don't worry, it only goes wrong "sometimes"...
 
£90 for last quater ,thought that abit much but my ex has been doing her washing quite a lot ,elec oven and washer are the biggest users in my house
 
I've just signed up to British Gas's free energy tariff fixed until March 2018. Same unit and standing charge as the standard dual fuel tariff we're on now for gas and leccy 6 days a week, and on a Sunday we get free electricity 9am-5pm. So going to save up all of our washing and stuff during the week and do it all and tumble dried on a sunday whilst its free. They're coming to install a smart meter on Friday which will tell us how much we're paying each day etc. Currently pay ~£120 combined by monthly DD for both gas and elec but thats building up a credit to cover us in the winter. Gas is only used for the heating and hot water, currently using a newish condenser boiler. When we get the bathroom done, going to do away with the hot water tank and get a combi boiler. We have an electric oven and induction hob for our cooking.
 
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Wow, some of the usage here is crazy!

We pay £67 for our G+E monthly, 3 bed house, and over a year and 3 months, we managed to be £437 in credit! I use OVO as a little savings account now :)
 
Wow, some of the usage here is crazy!

We pay £67 for our G+E monthly, 3 bed house, and over a year and 3 months, we managed to be £437 in credit! I use OVO as a little savings account now :)

Same! Ours is also £67 pcm but because we have solar panels, we use a fraction of the electricity. In the summer (when we don't heat the house) the gas is also massively low. Last month the combined bill came to £36 (4 bed with 2 adults and a dog) :p
 
Wow, some of the usage here is crazy!

We pay £67 for our G+E monthly, 3 bed house, and over a year and 3 months, we managed to be £437 in credit! I use OVO as a little savings account now :)

we used to pay the same in our old house which was a new build only 4 years ago, that had a combi boiler etc and we were only £30 for each. Our new house we just moved into a year ago was built in the 70's so i think the thermal properties of the house aren't as good, but it is a much bigger house though. and over christmas our first child was born premature and when we brought her home we had to have the house heated to 24 degrees all day every day for her for a couple of months and built up a huge debit, thats when BG doubled our price to £60 for each. It is coming down now thankfully and will get used to how the house warms over the winter. The heating hasn't been on at all in last 3 months at least.

just checked out ovo's costs vs my current with BG

electricity
BG:
Standing charge 26.01p
kWh 12.46p
OVO:
standing 28.77p
kWh 12.41p

gas
BG:
Standing charge 26.01p
kWh 3.75p
OVO:
standing 12.41p
kWh 2.74p
 
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Same! Ours is also £67 pcm but because we have solar panels, we use a fraction of the electricity. In the summer (when we don't heat the house) the gas is also massively low. Last month the combined bill came to £36 (4 bed with 2 adults and a dog) :p

i would like to get solar panels but i think we've missed the boat with all the good deals you could get with selling it back to the grid etc
 
smart meters are literally the best thing ever.

if our combined gas/elec goes over £3/day on the display then it's time to worry.

I've just bought a new build which has a smart meter and a little wireless display, I'm constantly watching it like a hawk now :o
 
I've just bought a new build which has a smart meter and a little wireless display, I'm constantly watching it like a hawk now :o

yeah you learn your average daily usage pretty quickly and how much something like gaming for a few hours effects your daily usage.
 
Just thought I would weigh in on this with something that has seriously been bothering me for quite some time now.

Annual gas and leccy bill were around £1500 per year.

I since invested changing 14 x 50w bulbs with 14 x 4w LEDs. All bulbs bar one in the house have been changed from 17w(?) to the 7w glow efforts. The bedroom 15w (6x) changed to 6x 1w LED. Then had all new insulation put in and a new boiler (old boiler the gas man said was probably 10-15% efficient) we now have a 90%+ rated combi.

Even lowered tortoises 100W bulb to 60w and only have on thermostat during winter months.

Annual bill came in almost unchanged. Can someone put it simple please?

Oh also all switches were turned off too with one exception (alarm).
 
J
Annual bill came in almost unchanged. Can someone put it simple please?

Did the price per unit go up?

You would need to dig out the actual bills covering the two annual periods and see what the total usage was (and if it was read or estimated) and then check the price.

If the usage was pretty similar, were you pretty efficient anyway? ie: not leaving lights on when unneeded etc

You would have thought the new boiler should have made a significant difference in gas usage though
 
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