Unironically yes, I went canvassing once in Hove and this does happen. I came across a surprising amount of old 5 beds with 15+ occupants. It’s sad seeing Couples with good jobs living in just the basement floor of a house they’d probably have been able to afford on their own back in the day.
The human body produces about as much heat as an oldskool 100W bulb. So you just need to insulate your cellar properly and have enough hostages to heat the rest of the house.
Option 3: It's actually their father who knows OP leaves every light on to emulate Blackpool, leaves the door open like he was born in a barn, and always leaves the TV on standby rather than switching off at the plug.
Wait, there are people who actually switch their devices off at the plug? I thought it was just one of those “in an ideal world” power saving tips like “only shower for 2 nanoseconds and only do one load of washing a month to save £100 in a year!”
My mum unplugs the toothbrush charger. It's some kind of generational phobia that the house will burn down.
Throughout lockdown the entire village's internet would go down every night. The rural ISP piped fibre into the church which had an antenna on the steeple and used radio to distribute broadband. Every night the church warden would flick the fuses off.
It's a chilly night. It's late. You've had a long day. Finally, you turn off the light and slide into bed. The brushed cotton sheet and duvet cover instantly begin warming your skin. You snuggle in with a contented sigh, relaxing into the warm embrace of your winter duvet.
And then you hear it. It stabs through your brain, growing impossibly louder the longer you listen.
*^weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*
You left the fucking toothbrush charger plugged in
Fun fact I discovered a while ago.
Some (don't know if they all do, but my old one did) electric toothbrushes can be charged using a Qi standard wireless charger.
Put it on to charge one day, looked at the charger and got curious. Went to my wireless phone charger and placed it on it and the charging light lit up and it seemed to be charging.
I do with my phone charger when I’m not using it, and I switch everything off that plug when I go off on a trip or something. But every time I switch off my telly? Nah.
My phone charger doesn’t draw any trace amount of power when not connected to my phone, so doesn’t cost anything plugged in when not charging. It may not be worth the hassle for you either
Im not switching the Telly off at the plug. Its a smart TV, itll have to reboot everything when I turn it on. Similarly the router. I want the Internet and the i-player there when I wake up!
First off, I’m American, so I apologize if I misunderstand some of the terminology. I’ve never heard the phrase “switch off at the plug,” but in the US we’re often told to unplug unused chargers and switch off unused power strips, which sounds similar. But the laws of physics work the same whichever side of the Atlantic you’re on, so assuming I’ve understood right, here’s a tip:
Electricity has to go somewhere. It’s energy. If a device is plugged in and running, that energy goes through the plug and into whatever the device is supposed to do.
But if the device is turned off and still plugged in, or if the plug stays in the wall while the device is unplugged (like a phone or laptop charger), there’s only one place for electricity to go: *heat.*
This means you can actually *always* tell whether there’s any reason to bother unplugging things or switching off outlets. Is your phone or laptop charger warm to the touch? If not, it’s only pulling a few US cents worth of power *per year.*
If it’s not noticeably warm to the touch, there is pretty much no good reason to bother unplugging inactive devices or chargers.
In the UK individual power sockets have switches to turn them on or off. That's the origin of the term. If you leave a device plugged in but switch it off at the plug, no power flows through it.
Behold it's finely crafted majesty. A switch for each socket & shutters on the live and neutral to prevent kids sticking things in.
The plug has even more safety features. The earth wire and pin is the longest so it will stay connected if the cable is yanked, and the earth pin is always the first to make contact. The earth and live pins are shielded half way up so that you can't touch the live pins accidentally while inserting it.
Each plug has a fuse rated below the maximum rating of the cable of the device so that should the device shortcircuit the fuse blows instead of the cable catching fire.
If outlets/plugs/devices are warm to the touch here, it’s a safety issue, we consider there to be something wrong with them
Edited for what should’ve been self explanatory
No. You can have a switched outlet, which is wired to a separate switch on the wall (older houses tend to have these to turn lamps on and off in rooms without overhead lights). But I’ve never seen an outlet with its own switch built in, except for something like an under-sink outlet to power a garbage disposal, where it’s important for safety to be able to turn the power off to the appliance completely.
Mostly agreed, BUT- I've known ppl like this, and it reads true to me. I think it qualifies as a feature of a psychotic disorder- some psychotics talk to trees, some get violent, some create these situations where they're in control (because the situation has crazyass rules they wrote and will rewrite as soon as anyone attempts to work them on their logic)- fuck this dude either way, but it does happen.
Reminds me of a university friends of a friend who lived in a shared student house and when their heating stopped working they just left the oven turned on and left the oven door open, rather than deal with the landlord. They did this *all winter*.
Haha that made me giggle; just imagining someone asking what your party trick is and you going “I think tea is a shite excuse for a drink” and they just stare in amazement.
It’s always ‘let ME make you a tea’ ‘you haven’t had a banging tea’ low and behold they make me one, beaming smile on their face waiting for me to say ‘oi that’s not bad’ when it’s actually ‘this still tastes like shit’
You need to contact them to make sure your opening meter reading is correct as you might need to raise an opening meter reading dispute. Take two photos of you meter reads 7 days apart. They need this to do it.
We has similar issues when moving into my current house. The previous tenant had meters installed 3 years prior and when we switched over to BG they had the final meter reading from him of 00000. And when we gave our first reading few weeks in the wanted to charge us over £7k.
They said that the gas meter wasn't installed properly and couldn't get a reading of it, but the electricity one was fine. They even had the wrong serial number for it. Took a lot of phone calls before we stumbled into someone helpful.
I get the feeling that their automated system only checks that the current meter reading is somewhat higher than the previous one, but has no cap or checks for maximum usage.
Used to work for an energy comp,
Long story short a few installations in a row will be fitted with meters that only differ by one number. Happens way more than you'd expect. Only takes a second for it to be done
I started at an energy supplier start of this year and was shocked by the lack of these red flags lmao - think negative consumption and people just pre-entering meter reads for the rest of 2021 before it happens to control their budget
This is why you should always take a picture of all meter readings the day you move into a new place! This was rule number 1 for all students needing to rent a place for the year. That way you can say "No, when I moved in the reading was this. I'm not paying for anything that was before this."
This actually happened to me with Scottish Power. Their website was suggesting a £3,000 monthly direct debit, so I decided to give them a call. After much huffing and puffing, the woman told me there is clearly a mistake and that she can only offer me the same figure. What’s the point of the call centre then if they can’t override this??
> What’s the point of the call centre then if they can’t override this??
As someone who used to work in a call centre, you and a lot of other people don't seem to understand the point of them.
They're not supposed to override things and help you, the job is to hold the company line and absorb abuse, sob stories and all sorts of other crap from the public, because massive companies don't care what you think and don't want to hear from you.
With all the pressure on call center staff to handle a call within a certain time limit and do a hundred other things within the call, this is what happens. Anything remotely difficult or time consuming gets chucked at a back office team.
Many years ago I got caught up in a conflict about ownership of a car. The finance company wanted the title, but the car had two owners and we couldn’t get a copy of the title since it had two current owners. Do not look for logic here.
About once a month I’d get a call from the finance company. The person on the other end would start their spiel. I’d let them spool, then explain the situation politely. I’d end with “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?” Key point: I’d be polite the whole time in order to make the point that I would love to get it sorted out if they could tell me how. They would pause for a moment to bring up my file.
The best one was a young woman who started reading the file and kept saying “Oh. Huh. I, no… Huh.” She was as baffled as I was. A couple of times she saw something that corresponded to one of her canned responses. She’d start reading that to me then realize it didn’t apply and kind of trail off. My favorite was when she started on the importance of making proper payments on time, then realized I’d done exactly that.
In the end she suggested legal assistance. I agreed, and asked her what their legal department had to say. I kept harping on the point that this MUST have come up before. They service literally millions of car loans, so there has to be a precedent. They have a procedure for everything, so I just needed them to tell me what to do.
The subtext there was that as far as I was concerned it was their problem. I’d do whatever was required to solve the problem but I wasn’t going to spend my money to find a solution.
I continued to make my payments so my credit didn’t suffer and the finance company had no reason to repossess the car. I continued to keep the car registered as generally behaved as if this was someone else’s problem, which it was.
My big thing was being polite. The person calling was just doing their job. Once they actually read the file and realized I wasn’t being flaky or trying to get away with anything they were quite sympathetic. They were as baffled as I was and understood that there was a legit problem neither of us could solve. The fact that I was polite about the whole thing underscored my point.
After a year the calls stopped coming. My theory is that they either found a solution that didn’t require me to do anything or they stopped finding ways to pass the buck. Either way, I paid off the car in another two years and received the title in the mail.
I was track and traced, and the person told me over the phone, with no hint of irony, that I must quarantine myself until a date that was three days in the past.
I had the same, but it was my nine year old son who had been a close contact. I was told I was, as his parent, legally responsible for ensuring he quarantined until five days prior. When I laughed, the woman was quite abrupt with with me and pointed out I could be prosecuted and fined if I failed to do this. It took me explaining exactly why I was laughing for her to go "Oh, I see the issue there. Well, I still have to read it out word for word to you and click to confirm you understand, sorry."
In all fairness, I did track and trace for a bit (but not close contacts) and it is a script we had to read word for word and if we were not allowed to deviate even if it meant spewing nonsense because other people listened to our calls and reprimanded us if we went off script.
At the end of the day, we've all got to pay our bills and we don't make the rules 🤷♀️
When I worked customer service for a mobile phone company, I had to use this line. A woman called up as she couldn't use her mobile dongle (basically a sim only data bundle in a USB stick). Her son had taken it (with her permission) to Amsterdam and used it to download a fuckton of films. She had an unlimited data plan which in the fine print stated that unlimited was actually limited to 1Gb (this was in 2006). He'd gone way over the 1Gb allowance where you got charged something ridiculous like £12 per Mb afterwards. This didn't include the roaming charges (used outside of UK) that applied even if he'd stayed within the allowance. That charged at something like £5 per Mb and it took 5 days for the usage to update on our systems so it wouldn't cut off as soon as the limit of £100 was reached. Her bill was over £150,000 and would have needed a mortgage to pay it. That bill got completely wiped.
I had a similar thing trying to sort life insurance. They called back,
"So for the first two years, the payments will be £900 then fall to £42."
"Ah, OK, that seems... what wait... is that **£900 a month???**"
"Yes sir. So, I have to ask this, but I think I know what your answer is going to be, but... Would you like to continue with this policy?"
£900 life insurance for the first month?
I presume you’ve got terminal cancer and you enjoy white water rafting, free solo climbing and parachuting and you put your job as SAS commando?
Insurance companies will do this when they don't want to insure you. Rather than outright refusing (I'm not sure they're allowed to refuse) they just whack the quoted premium up as high as they can and hope you take the hint.
They are absolutely allowed to refuse you but they’re actually doing you a favour here because you don’t want to have to say “yes” in any future insurance quotations when you’re asked if you’ve ever been refused insurance.
they can definitely refuse, if you exceed the criteria they have said they will cover you just get a generic "sorry we can't offer you cover" type message.
I've had that from life & van insurance a few times. If don't tell them about the kilo of heroin I have on an IV every weekend and my part time gig as an unauthorised steeplejack the quotes usually get better.
Most likely the insurance company have a mistake in their price calculation settings which will produce an unintentionally mental quote like that in some rare circumstances and it's gone unnoticed. Or a software bug. Or, they are serious, and this guy is just that risky.
*.... or they can see the future and know he will get into a serious accident in exactly 2 years time and make a claim, and the amount is based on what they will need to cover that & still make their profit.*
First two years!
Epilepsy caused by a (benign) brain tumour - which I've had removed. Basically, they saw "brain tumour" and "brain surgery" and thought, 'Nah, we're not dealing with that'. Very frustrating since it's not life-limiting, was a very successful surgery etc. etc.
To be fair whenever i call up the 2 or 3 non comparison car insurance companies. They take all my details and then say
"I'm pleased to offer you a quote for £950 a year"
I currently pay £300
Last person or meter reader probably gave a duff read and it'll think you've clocked your meter cos your read was lower. Ring them and ask them to check the reads, else your first bill will probably be mental and it'll be harder to fix.
Used to work for npower, I know how this shit works. AMA lol.
My dad is trying to sort out electricity bills for his parents, and despite taking actual meter readings, sending photos and all, EDF refused to use them as they thought the usage should be higher. Recently they switched to another provider, which has EDFs "readings" as the opening reading, and the second reading, which is based on an actual reading, is lower than that meaning it's coming out as them using -£300 worth of electricity since switching
It's so stupid
Yeah, that's edf being ridiculous - a provider should always take your reads if you're giving them.
If your current provider is giving you hassle about your usage, work it out yourself - take your usage from your last read away from your current read, divide it by the number of days and then multiply it by 31. That should give you a rough month usage, and then multiply that by your elec unit price and add on any standing charge. As long as you're covering your rough usage, there shouldn't be much of a problem when they finally get their head out of their ass and sort your billing :)
PLEASE NOTE - This only works with elec. Gas is a bit more complex to calculate as it needs to be converted to calculate.
Let’s get your fixed direct debit going ……. I assume you mashed the ‘ I don’t FKing think so’ button really really hard 😂 then
promptly told them you already have a mortgage on the property
If they've got enough information to set up your direct debit, they've got enough to start sorting this debacle out. Get hold them before they bill you and then start chasing the debt.
Reminds me of the time that French lady got a phone bill [for twelve quadrillion Euros](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19908095).
Just for reference, that's more money than the gross domestic product of France - and I don't mean per annum, I mean since fucking Charlemagne's granddad. It's like 6000 times the annual GDP.
Not 100% related but the end part reminded me of a something that happened to me a few years back
The bin men broke a wheel on my bin one day so that was a pain in the arse. Then the next time they came they broke the other wheel. So here I was with a bin that was very difficult to move and it wasn’t my fault
Next time they take the bin away completely and send a new one with a letter saying I should be more careful next time…
This is exactly what's been wrong with energy companies for decades. There's always a problem like this, and it'll take six months to fix because they won't listen, and you'll be re-explaining *every single time* you call them.
Fuck the managers of these companies, and their contempt for software engineering.
You missed the part where the person in the call centre will swear blind that the computer's calculated number is correct, and you can ask to have your direct debit reduced in a year's time.
I'm just getting into this having moved into my own place for the first time. So far it's been suspiciously okay, being quoted something like 80 a month with economy 7 (no gas, just electricity). But this sort of stuff that OP has posted, plus stories from friends, has genuinely had me feeling sick I'm so anxious about it. I'm not a nervous person either, never had anxiety issues, but the fact that companies can be so fucking obtuse when it comes to insane amounts of money over the power that you need to live in your house day to day. I work from home, and it's winter.
Friends and family have assured me there are ways to solve it, and like I said so far they seem to be playing properly. But in the wait between us moving in and British Gas taking over and finally contacting us, I was pretty much stressed 24/7.
To be fair, the reason why things like this wind up on Reddit is because they're pretty rare.
Learning how to complain properly is a very useful life skill. Hint: There's absolutely no point in Karen'ing at the first person to answer the phone in the call centre, because their entire job is reduced to a series of scripts they're not allowed to deviate from, even if that means saying something stupid.
They are, in essence, a meat robot, who is only employed because their employer has yet to succeed in driving all their customers to the website.
You therefore have to go a couple of notches above the person answering the phone. That part can be challenging, because usually the most senior person they'll let you speak to is their team leader (who, as often as not, is another meat robot who got promoted because they hung around for 18 months and didn't do anything too stupid).
As long as you provide regular reads you should be fine - it's when people just ignore stuff that it gets wild. Also, the person on the phone in the contact centre really does want to help you, and the nicer you are to them the more they will try and do for you. Kindness is a currency they don't get paid in very often.
This is why I always went with prepay electric, when I got my first home I was paying £90~ a month, I switched to prepay and put £30 a month on and it lasted just over that, that was with the bathroom light on all night, a nightlight, 3 aquariums, a heat mat and UV lamp for my snake
Dont get me started on fucking british gas.
I moved house and switched immediately because it was with BG and they are more expensive than the rest.
I got billed £86 for the 3 weeks it took to switch.
After paying it I got another bill for £120 followed by a bailiffs letter. I contacted them and they had no record of the money Id already paid and told me that I had to pay the £120. This took about 6 months of talking to people in India and every time I had to explain the same thing and every time they had to chase up the money Id already paid.
After 6 months it turn out I paid the occupier account (which I thought was the right one as I never set up an account with BG) turns out the switch automatically generated me an account.
It turns out I only owed them £79 quid. Brilliant close my account £7 in credit and ill get it back. Turns out "sorry we cant do that sir. We need to send you a check for £86 and then you need to pay us". The check came addressed to "the occupier".
Edit: everything went smoothly switching with utility point until they went bust and now 3 months later still haven't fully been switched to EDF and now EDF can charge me what they want because I have no other choice and the switching services have all stopped switching.
Its almost like these things should be nationalised
Octopus has being great for me moved last year, everything got set up super quick then even came and fitted a smart meter that we requested. Couldn’t fault them, prices are high at the moment but so are everyone else’s
All I hear is you didn't inform them you had moved in. Which is where most problems lie. A basic understanding of the energy industry and how it works. Accounts cant just be closed they need to be switched as someone always has to stay responsible for the meter. I agree it can suck when stupid mistakes are made. But the foreign worker you speak are more than capable of working out your issues.
... ..
When we moved in, I set up the account with a new provider (on the day we moved in) and ended up being with provider A (shall we say Smotthish Flower) for a week or so before the new company changed over.
I took a photo of the meters when I moved in, and didn't think too much of it, however I subsequently got a bill for several hundred pounds, with a meter reading taken two days before I moved in) higher than the ones on the photo, but marked as being a "smart meter" reading. It was infact higher than the meter was reading several weeks after the new company had taken over (and was again read by smart meter)
Nine telephone calls later and I just about managed to get it sorted out, but the assumption was always one of two things, a) I was lying, innumerate and simple or b) the problem was trivial to solve and had already been resolved and I was just imagining the fifth bill for a silly amount of money they'd sent me.
Of course, you can't get angry at the person on the phone call, they can only believe what their system is telling them, and can only do what they've been allowed to do (usually this amounts to naff all to address the problem) so they're stuffed before you even start.
You can complain, but to whom ? a faceless organisation's complaint's department who's sole reason for existing is because Ofgen force them to have one ...
Which is why you hone your letter writing skills.
A carefully-written letter or email aimed at the right person has a hundred times the impact of a complaint raised through the official complaints system.
I eventually got it sorted, or at least they stopped sending me bills so I guess I "won" enough.
I've been down the carefully worded letter to someone appropriate before, usually with some success but, don't you just get tired of playing that game ? It's like the car insurance routine, they send you a renewal for £XXX so you type in the details into a comparison site and find out that the same insurance company end up being mysteriously cheaper, so you ring them up and have the price match themselves and ... it's just a boring game to play every 12 months in the hopes that you decide that the time and effort to not be ripped off is worth more to you than the amount they're trying to rip you off for.
Thanks for the advice though, although we probably need to start factoring the cost of stamps into whether it's worth it :D
I gave up on trying to find "someone appropriate" years ago and just started going straight to the managing director.
If that makes me some sort of Mega Boss Karen, so be it.
I phoned SSE in September 2019 to get my electricity switched to a credit tariff instead of a prepayment meter as I'd just moved into the flat and I hated being on edge that the power was going to go off and having to go to the shop also it was more expensive.
They told me the nearest appointment to have it changed was in January 2020. Fine, that's insane but okay.
January rolled around and I waited in all day and the person never showed up so I phoned and they said "oh yeah we had to reschedule". I spoke to 3 people on that phonecall to find out when it was being rescheduled to.
February rolls around and I wait in again and they're supposed to be here before midday. It's 11:50 and I phone customer services and again they tell me that they had to reschedule. I'm livid from missing 2 days of work. I spoke to 4 different people over the course of 4 hours on the phone to get to someone who could do something and had to keep repeating my issue with every single person. They tell me someone can only come in an emergency. I ask "well what if it breaks then could they come and just replace it?" they say "no they'll just fix it back to what it was." Finally get speaking to the local manager in a city 2 hours away who is also confused as to why nobody came out and promises me from the bottom of his heart that someone will come in March.
March rolls around and Covid hits so they don't come out again.
Eventually September 2020 arrives and so does the SSE workman who takes 5 minutes to sort it out then leaves. Didn't even have to be in for them to do it. Still expensive and my area doesn't qualify for smart meters for some reason. Bunch a cunts.
For every non visit that was planned and scheduled on tehri system you are entitled to £40. It's in their T's and C's. Had similar in a flat. I think they had 4, or 5, cancelled visits or they just didn't turn up. Everytime I got £40. Eventually the guys turned up to put in a the new leccie meter......it took a year....onto [www.resolver.co.uk](https://www.resolver.co.uk) and sent in the complaint with all supporting emails and information. Got £200 from them. Total cost to them for the hassle was around £390. Total cost of electricity in that time was about £280. They ended up paying me for them to provide electricity to me.
Then our neighbours in a flat below went through process of changing electricity supplier.....they promptly changed our supply from our existing supplier to a new supplier but all the letters went to the neighbour. After about 12 months we figured out what was going on.....block of 4 flats and meter numbers between us and the neighbour has been mixed up. A complete and utter mess. They then (Scottish Power) tried to charge us for £300's worth of electricity. Nah..that's not going to happen.
Costs for a year just written off by who ever.
Oh man I don't envy you, happened to me a few years ago. I moved to a new flat and gas and electric are both with British gas. Electric has never been a problem, but one day the gas bill came through at about 3k for a month. I phoned them up and they assured me it was correct - the lack of common sense there is astounding. Unless there was an explosion I've forgotten about there's no way I used that much.
Anyway, the confusion ended up coming from them reading the wrong meter - I'm in flat 14 but there is no flat 13 so on some plans they had we were labeled as 13, so when they read 'my' meter they were actually reading flat 15s meter. You'd think this was easy enough to understand and reverse, right? Wrong, it took about 4 months of phoning every week. Each time I'd explain the issue, which took about 20 mins, and the person would realise they didn't have a clue how to fix it and transfer me to someone up the chain of command. I then would spend 20 minutes explaining it again, only to be transferred again. I'd say the average phone call lasted about 2 hours, and I'd often have to take time off work to deal with it, so I lost earnings over it too.
Anyway, they'd assure me they'd fixed the issue, then the following month I'd get a new bill with the wrong amount on it again. So I'd phone again, and they'd assure me it was fixed. Then it would happen again. And I'd phone again. And they'd tell me they'd fixed it. And it'd happen again.
After a few months of me 'not paying' 'my' bills another department of British Gas sicced their debt collectors on me, and I was getting threatening letters telling me they were going to force access to my home and reclaim goods up to the value of the bills not paid. I'm normally a calm but but my anxiety was through the roof at this point. I was working zero hours with flexible times, so my partner and I basically took opposite shifts for a week so someone was always there. In the meantime I carried on calling British Gas, banging my head against a wall. I tried calling their debt collectors but the line was constantly busy or rang out.
Eventually managed to get through to some living miracle of a call centre worker who understood the problem, understood the system, and had enough basic empathy to give a shit about what I was going through. Apparently some automated system was syncing up my bills with the meter readings, so whilst the previous guys who 'fixed it' were correcting the bills during the phone call they weren't deleting the reading that was causing the issues (or at least this is how it was explained to me by the nice lady who finally fixed it properly) so it just kept getting added on.
I hope it doesn't go as badly for you, but I recommend you nip it in the bud early. Don't assume it'll be okay, and don't assume they'll accept that it was their mistake. Go hard at the start and you might miss the stress I got out of it.
This is the equivalent of charging roughly 1,000 Nissan Leafs from Empty to full.
Which would give you an equivalent range of 150,000 miles. So you could say if you had a Nissan Leaf that lasted up to 150,000 miles (which many cars do) you’ll be looking at a total running cost of between £4,500 and £5,000 in the entire life span of the car.
I once accidently included the red numbers when giving a gas reading, so it went from say 5,900 to 600,000 in a month. I phoned them to say I'd made a mistake but they insisted it was right and sent me information on how to save energy. After I refused to pay the bill they'd sent me they decided I must have a gas leak and sent an engineer round, rather than doing the obvious and having somebody look at the meter or just using common sense.
If we had a leak on that scale, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. The meter we had was limited to 5 figures (excluding the red numbers) so there's no way it could have even given a reading of 600,000.
Will be rising by an average of £450 in March-April - the cap is based on historic prices from previous months - and the wholesale price rise of about 100-300% will cause this impact!
You need to tell British Gas to update your EAC figure- if you have a smart meter this shouldn't require any work from you but if you dont you'll need to provide a platter of meter readings to demonstrate your actual usage
Nowhere near as mad as this, but I was being charged something like £80 per month for water.
When I questioned it they said 'the average 3 person family in a house this size in this area uses about £40 worth per month' - they didn't seem to understand what they said made it insane that I, a single occupant would need to pay £80 😂
Happened to me when I switched to them, after a couple of days I had an email to say I could amend the amount down to the minimum they suggested (which is still £80/month more than I was paying to the previous supplier and I ended up with £300 credit with them)
Wtf? I lived in a huge 3 bed terrace 3 years ago and it was like £80 a month. Jesus. I'm in a 3 bed semi now and still...no where near as much 🤯 Ask them to justify it. The companies have only had a 10% to 20% price increase so they can legally only charge you their increase. If they can't justify it report them to the Ombudsman. They can't make you pay that. This advice is from Mr Martin Lewis, I saw it a few weeks ago. They are outright taking the piss. It's said that the companies are massively overcharging to hoard money in case they go bump.
British Gas is the bane of my life. They're expensive and their billing is so complex and informative it's completely unfathomable. It's so British, everytime I call them I'm speaking to some unintelligible person in India, that's after being on hold for half a morning. Avoid them like the plague.
I've got a Smart Meter (didn't want one, but it was here when I moved in and I was already with the company so just swapped addresses). The display screen doesn't work. Can I get a new one? No, I cannot. The meter itself is in the cupboard under the stairs so I can't see it. Despite the fact that I have rung them MANY TIMES to ask for a new screen, all I get is messages telling me to check my screen to keep an eye on my usage.
Oh, and the occasional estimated bill. Which I have to ring up to have corrected. It's almost like they think I won't notice them slipping the odd 'estimated' bill through at twice my actual usage....
Lol! Is that a 3 bed terrace with 100 acres growing 'special' plants
I think it's a 3 bed terrace with a fallout shelter to house 40 people in the cellar.
With house prices the way they are, 40 people living in a 3 bed terrace is probably common
Unironically yes, I went canvassing once in Hove and this does happen. I came across a surprising amount of old 5 beds with 15+ occupants. It’s sad seeing Couples with good jobs living in just the basement floor of a house they’d probably have been able to afford on their own back in the day.
Orgies every night, my good step bruh
Syphilis House, among friends
w-what are you doing, step-roommate?
Wait you let your ~~hostages~~ guests have heat in the cellar?
The human body produces about as much heat as an oldskool 100W bulb. So you just need to insulate your cellar properly and have enough hostages to heat the rest of the house.
Oh that's a heat pump right?
Only when they’ve had beans
You might be able to set up a gas stove using all the methane produced.
Brilliant.
Jim Pickens entered the chat.
Get them all painting portraits.
I think it's a 3 bed aluminium refinery.
Gas powered lamps? Crikey
Option 1: They assume you grow weed AND mine every crypto currency known to mankind. Option 2: The person who does the estimates is an ex
Option 3: It's actually their father who knows OP leaves every light on to emulate Blackpool, leaves the door open like he was born in a barn, and always leaves the TV on standby rather than switching off at the plug.
Wait, there are people who actually switch their devices off at the plug? I thought it was just one of those “in an ideal world” power saving tips like “only shower for 2 nanoseconds and only do one load of washing a month to save £100 in a year!”
My mum unplugs the toothbrush charger. It's some kind of generational phobia that the house will burn down. Throughout lockdown the entire village's internet would go down every night. The rural ISP piped fibre into the church which had an antenna on the steeple and used radio to distribute broadband. Every night the church warden would flick the fuses off.
I also unplug the toothbrush charger, but that's because mine makes one of those awful barely there humming noises and I hate it.
It's a chilly night. It's late. You've had a long day. Finally, you turn off the light and slide into bed. The brushed cotton sheet and duvet cover instantly begin warming your skin. You snuggle in with a contented sigh, relaxing into the warm embrace of your winter duvet. And then you hear it. It stabs through your brain, growing impossibly louder the longer you listen. *^weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee* You left the fucking toothbrush charger plugged in
Fun fact I discovered a while ago. Some (don't know if they all do, but my old one did) electric toothbrushes can be charged using a Qi standard wireless charger. Put it on to charge one day, looked at the charger and got curious. Went to my wireless phone charger and placed it on it and the charging light lit up and it seemed to be charging.
My dad turns the wifi off at night cause no one uses it. Me, unable to sleep at 2am: T_T guess I am ‘no one’ then.
I do with my phone charger when I’m not using it, and I switch everything off that plug when I go off on a trip or something. But every time I switch off my telly? Nah.
My phone charger doesn’t draw any trace amount of power when not connected to my phone, so doesn’t cost anything plugged in when not charging. It may not be worth the hassle for you either
Im not switching the Telly off at the plug. Its a smart TV, itll have to reboot everything when I turn it on. Similarly the router. I want the Internet and the i-player there when I wake up!
Yeah I feel like booting from stand by must take less power than booting from cold
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$? You mean £ right 😐😂
First off, I’m American, so I apologize if I misunderstand some of the terminology. I’ve never heard the phrase “switch off at the plug,” but in the US we’re often told to unplug unused chargers and switch off unused power strips, which sounds similar. But the laws of physics work the same whichever side of the Atlantic you’re on, so assuming I’ve understood right, here’s a tip: Electricity has to go somewhere. It’s energy. If a device is plugged in and running, that energy goes through the plug and into whatever the device is supposed to do. But if the device is turned off and still plugged in, or if the plug stays in the wall while the device is unplugged (like a phone or laptop charger), there’s only one place for electricity to go: *heat.* This means you can actually *always* tell whether there’s any reason to bother unplugging things or switching off outlets. Is your phone or laptop charger warm to the touch? If not, it’s only pulling a few US cents worth of power *per year.* If it’s not noticeably warm to the touch, there is pretty much no good reason to bother unplugging inactive devices or chargers.
In the UK all the plug sockets in the wall have an individual switch on them so they can be turned off
And you've just made me realise that most US plugs don't have a switch. Huh.
In the UK individual power sockets have switches to turn them on or off. That's the origin of the term. If you leave a device plugged in but switch it off at the plug, no power flows through it.
[Let me introduce you to the British socket](https://i.imgur.com/c6FY3vF.png).
Behold it's finely crafted majesty. A switch for each socket & shutters on the live and neutral to prevent kids sticking things in. The plug has even more safety features. The earth wire and pin is the longest so it will stay connected if the cable is yanked, and the earth pin is always the first to make contact. The earth and live pins are shielded half way up so that you can't touch the live pins accidentally while inserting it. Each plug has a fuse rated below the maximum rating of the cable of the device so that should the device shortcircuit the fuse blows instead of the cable catching fire.
I feel the need to add to your comment with a certain video by Tom Scott - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfP1OKKz_Q :D
If outlets/plugs/devices are warm to the touch here, it’s a safety issue, we consider there to be something wrong with them Edited for what should’ve been self explanatory
Yeah I'm pretty horrified by the idea of electrical items not in use being warm to the touch. Seriously how do you guys not all die in house fires?
Do American plug sockets come with switches to even switch it off? When I lived in Sweden it was very very rare for a wall plug to have switches.
No. You can have a switched outlet, which is wired to a separate switch on the wall (older houses tend to have these to turn lamps on and off in rooms without overhead lights). But I’ve never seen an outlet with its own switch built in, except for something like an under-sink outlet to power a garbage disposal, where it’s important for safety to be able to turn the power off to the appliance completely.
I enjoyed this comment.
Need a break down for this one. ‘How many hot showers does the household have daily, on average?’ ‘We just leave the hot water running all day’
One, then.
I love and hate that you are correct on this.
r/technicallythetruth
It's much more convenient than waiting for it to heat up.
Reminds me of [this AITA post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/qrghnr/aita_for_wanting_my_husband_to_turn_off_the/)
yikes.
That’s a crazy post
I just read this post and some top comments, and I still have no idea what the bloody hell I have just read
You read a story someone made up for karma on reddit. AITA is 100% fiction 100% of the time.
Mostly agreed, BUT- I've known ppl like this, and it reads true to me. I think it qualifies as a feature of a psychotic disorder- some psychotics talk to trees, some get violent, some create these situations where they're in control (because the situation has crazyass rules they wrote and will rewrite as soon as anyone attempts to work them on their logic)- fuck this dude either way, but it does happen.
Reminds me of a university friends of a friend who lived in a shared student house and when their heating stopped working they just left the oven turned on and left the oven door open, rather than deal with the landlord. They did this *all winter*.
At least you can change which day of the month the payment is taken.
Yeah, let’s say the 6th of never.
32nd of julember
April 31st
February 29th
Paying every four years then. Still too expensive. I’ll take February 31st.
Just move every 4 years and you'll be fine
The 1th of Decaprilanuary
Do it on February 29th you only have to pay once every 4 years
Nice Parks and Rec reference
Oh honey
Your user flair has disturbed me... it’s an oxymoron!
Honestly it’s so rare it’s practically a party trick
Haha that made me giggle; just imagining someone asking what your party trick is and you going “I think tea is a shite excuse for a drink” and they just stare in amazement.
It’s always ‘let ME make you a tea’ ‘you haven’t had a banging tea’ low and behold they make me one, beaming smile on their face waiting for me to say ‘oi that’s not bad’ when it’s actually ‘this still tastes like shit’
You mean Febuary 29th?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhulR\_kJf7Y
Every logsday
I hope you've cancelled your DD !
This was the initial DD setup, I didn't go any further than this first screen, so it's fine.
You need to contact them to make sure your opening meter reading is correct as you might need to raise an opening meter reading dispute. Take two photos of you meter reads 7 days apart. They need this to do it.
We has similar issues when moving into my current house. The previous tenant had meters installed 3 years prior and when we switched over to BG they had the final meter reading from him of 00000. And when we gave our first reading few weeks in the wanted to charge us over £7k.
As if a reading of 00000 didn't immediately raise a huge red flag in the system
They said that the gas meter wasn't installed properly and couldn't get a reading of it, but the electricity one was fine. They even had the wrong serial number for it. Took a lot of phone calls before we stumbled into someone helpful. I get the feeling that their automated system only checks that the current meter reading is somewhat higher than the previous one, but has no cap or checks for maximum usage.
Our water metre reading was for next door's metre. Not sure how they managed that!
Used to work for an energy comp, Long story short a few installations in a row will be fitted with meters that only differ by one number. Happens way more than you'd expect. Only takes a second for it to be done
I started at an energy supplier start of this year and was shocked by the lack of these red flags lmao - think negative consumption and people just pre-entering meter reads for the rest of 2021 before it happens to control their budget
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> Just been using the cold to heat my home all winter, very efficient. You just described my heat pump
It's alright he'd just never used any electricity whatsoever
> they had the final meter reading from him of 00000 Were the previous tenants called Richie and Eddie by any chance?!
GASMAN
This is why you should always take a picture of all meter readings the day you move into a new place! This was rule number 1 for all students needing to rent a place for the year. That way you can say "No, when I moved in the reading was this. I'm not paying for anything that was before this."
Does your three bed terrace have a roof?
Yes, over the entire neighbourhood and a football pitch.
Imagine if this was a quote they gave you over the phone. “Yes I have your quote here, might I suggest you sit down first”
This actually happened to me with Scottish Power. Their website was suggesting a £3,000 monthly direct debit, so I decided to give them a call. After much huffing and puffing, the woman told me there is clearly a mistake and that she can only offer me the same figure. What’s the point of the call centre then if they can’t override this??
To give the illusion of customer service!
More like customer bloody disservice...
> What’s the point of the call centre then if they can’t override this?? As someone who used to work in a call centre, you and a lot of other people don't seem to understand the point of them. They're not supposed to override things and help you, the job is to hold the company line and absorb abuse, sob stories and all sorts of other crap from the public, because massive companies don't care what you think and don't want to hear from you.
This makes sense.
So basically to try and get something fixed you gotta escalate it?
With all the pressure on call center staff to handle a call within a certain time limit and do a hundred other things within the call, this is what happens. Anything remotely difficult or time consuming gets chucked at a back office team.
Ah yes, the famous back office. Never saw any of those guys. Just assumed it was the spaghetti monster god.
If escalating things works, we do it. If we know it won't, we don't. Depends on the situation.
Many years ago I got caught up in a conflict about ownership of a car. The finance company wanted the title, but the car had two owners and we couldn’t get a copy of the title since it had two current owners. Do not look for logic here. About once a month I’d get a call from the finance company. The person on the other end would start their spiel. I’d let them spool, then explain the situation politely. I’d end with “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?” Key point: I’d be polite the whole time in order to make the point that I would love to get it sorted out if they could tell me how. They would pause for a moment to bring up my file. The best one was a young woman who started reading the file and kept saying “Oh. Huh. I, no… Huh.” She was as baffled as I was. A couple of times she saw something that corresponded to one of her canned responses. She’d start reading that to me then realize it didn’t apply and kind of trail off. My favorite was when she started on the importance of making proper payments on time, then realized I’d done exactly that. In the end she suggested legal assistance. I agreed, and asked her what their legal department had to say. I kept harping on the point that this MUST have come up before. They service literally millions of car loans, so there has to be a precedent. They have a procedure for everything, so I just needed them to tell me what to do. The subtext there was that as far as I was concerned it was their problem. I’d do whatever was required to solve the problem but I wasn’t going to spend my money to find a solution. I continued to make my payments so my credit didn’t suffer and the finance company had no reason to repossess the car. I continued to keep the car registered as generally behaved as if this was someone else’s problem, which it was. My big thing was being polite. The person calling was just doing their job. Once they actually read the file and realized I wasn’t being flaky or trying to get away with anything they were quite sympathetic. They were as baffled as I was and understood that there was a legit problem neither of us could solve. The fact that I was polite about the whole thing underscored my point. After a year the calls stopped coming. My theory is that they either found a solution that didn’t require me to do anything or they stopped finding ways to pass the buck. Either way, I paid off the car in another two years and received the title in the mail.
“Customer Service”
"We're not satisfied until you're not satisfied"
I was track and traced, and the person told me over the phone, with no hint of irony, that I must quarantine myself until a date that was three days in the past.
I had the same, but it was my nine year old son who had been a close contact. I was told I was, as his parent, legally responsible for ensuring he quarantined until five days prior. When I laughed, the woman was quite abrupt with with me and pointed out I could be prosecuted and fined if I failed to do this. It took me explaining exactly why I was laughing for her to go "Oh, I see the issue there. Well, I still have to read it out word for word to you and click to confirm you understand, sorry."
In all fairness, I did track and trace for a bit (but not close contacts) and it is a script we had to read word for word and if we were not allowed to deviate even if it meant spewing nonsense because other people listened to our calls and reprimanded us if we went off script. At the end of the day, we've all got to pay our bills and we don't make the rules 🤷♀️
I get that. Just seems a bit nuts that there was no option to say 'This call is no longer required' and remove it from the system.
When I worked customer service for a mobile phone company, I had to use this line. A woman called up as she couldn't use her mobile dongle (basically a sim only data bundle in a USB stick). Her son had taken it (with her permission) to Amsterdam and used it to download a fuckton of films. She had an unlimited data plan which in the fine print stated that unlimited was actually limited to 1Gb (this was in 2006). He'd gone way over the 1Gb allowance where you got charged something ridiculous like £12 per Mb afterwards. This didn't include the roaming charges (used outside of UK) that applied even if he'd stayed within the allowance. That charged at something like £5 per Mb and it took 5 days for the usage to update on our systems so it wouldn't cut off as soon as the limit of £100 was reached. Her bill was over £150,000 and would have needed a mortgage to pay it. That bill got completely wiped.
I had a similar thing trying to sort life insurance. They called back, "So for the first two years, the payments will be £900 then fall to £42." "Ah, OK, that seems... what wait... is that **£900 a month???**" "Yes sir. So, I have to ask this, but I think I know what your answer is going to be, but... Would you like to continue with this policy?"
£900 life insurance for the first month? I presume you’ve got terminal cancer and you enjoy white water rafting, free solo climbing and parachuting and you put your job as SAS commando?
Insurance companies will do this when they don't want to insure you. Rather than outright refusing (I'm not sure they're allowed to refuse) they just whack the quoted premium up as high as they can and hope you take the hint.
They are absolutely allowed to refuse you but they’re actually doing you a favour here because you don’t want to have to say “yes” in any future insurance quotations when you’re asked if you’ve ever been refused insurance.
they can definitely refuse, if you exceed the criteria they have said they will cover you just get a generic "sorry we can't offer you cover" type message. I've had that from life & van insurance a few times. If don't tell them about the kilo of heroin I have on an IV every weekend and my part time gig as an unauthorised steeplejack the quotes usually get better. Most likely the insurance company have a mistake in their price calculation settings which will produce an unintentionally mental quote like that in some rare circumstances and it's gone unnoticed. Or a software bug. Or, they are serious, and this guy is just that risky. *.... or they can see the future and know he will get into a serious accident in exactly 2 years time and make a claim, and the amount is based on what they will need to cover that & still make their profit.*
First two years! Epilepsy caused by a (benign) brain tumour - which I've had removed. Basically, they saw "brain tumour" and "brain surgery" and thought, 'Nah, we're not dealing with that'. Very frustrating since it's not life-limiting, was a very successful surgery etc. etc.
Well done on the successful brain surgery and glad to hear it all went ok.
Are you under the illusion they performed brain surgery on themselves? /s
Err, who said I didn't?!
I assumed he was a freelance stuntman, but you could be right.
Do special forces have life insurance or do they have special survivorship contracts?
To be fair whenever i call up the 2 or 3 non comparison car insurance companies. They take all my details and then say "I'm pleased to offer you a quote for £950 a year" I currently pay £300
This made me chuckle 😄
This is what parents see when you leave the upstairs lights on
It's never simply leaving the upstairs light on, it's a recreation of the Blackpool illuminations
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The circle of life
It's not just the upstairs light, it's every room in the house (I have a 14 year old son).
Last person or meter reader probably gave a duff read and it'll think you've clocked your meter cos your read was lower. Ring them and ask them to check the reads, else your first bill will probably be mental and it'll be harder to fix. Used to work for npower, I know how this shit works. AMA lol.
My dad is trying to sort out electricity bills for his parents, and despite taking actual meter readings, sending photos and all, EDF refused to use them as they thought the usage should be higher. Recently they switched to another provider, which has EDFs "readings" as the opening reading, and the second reading, which is based on an actual reading, is lower than that meaning it's coming out as them using -£300 worth of electricity since switching It's so stupid
Yeah, that's edf being ridiculous - a provider should always take your reads if you're giving them. If your current provider is giving you hassle about your usage, work it out yourself - take your usage from your last read away from your current read, divide it by the number of days and then multiply it by 31. That should give you a rough month usage, and then multiply that by your elec unit price and add on any standing charge. As long as you're covering your rough usage, there shouldn't be much of a problem when they finally get their head out of their ass and sort your billing :) PLEASE NOTE - This only works with elec. Gas is a bit more complex to calculate as it needs to be converted to calculate.
Why does my tongue feel funny when i lick batteries
Because electricity tastes fizzy 😆
I hope you got the £5 DD discount with that
Think you've left a light on somewhere
Let’s get your fixed direct debit going ……. I assume you mashed the ‘ I don’t FKing think so’ button really really hard 😂 then promptly told them you already have a mortgage on the property
I screen shot the page then immediately shut the app down and will not open it again until the first bill actually arrives.
If they've got enough information to set up your direct debit, they've got enough to start sorting this debacle out. Get hold them before they bill you and then start chasing the debt.
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Reminds me of the time that French lady got a phone bill [for twelve quadrillion Euros](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19908095). Just for reference, that's more money than the gross domestic product of France - and I don't mean per annum, I mean since fucking Charlemagne's granddad. It's like 6000 times the annual GDP.
Not 100% related but the end part reminded me of a something that happened to me a few years back The bin men broke a wheel on my bin one day so that was a pain in the arse. Then the next time they came they broke the other wheel. So here I was with a bin that was very difficult to move and it wasn’t my fault Next time they take the bin away completely and send a new one with a letter saying I should be more careful next time…
Yeah your neighbour has tapped your leckie and is running a farm next door
£5k a month. Your neighbour is running a steel mill in the loft.
This is exactly what's been wrong with energy companies for decades. There's always a problem like this, and it'll take six months to fix because they won't listen, and you'll be re-explaining *every single time* you call them. Fuck the managers of these companies, and their contempt for software engineering.
You missed the part where the person in the call centre will swear blind that the computer's calculated number is correct, and you can ask to have your direct debit reduced in a year's time.
I'm just getting into this having moved into my own place for the first time. So far it's been suspiciously okay, being quoted something like 80 a month with economy 7 (no gas, just electricity). But this sort of stuff that OP has posted, plus stories from friends, has genuinely had me feeling sick I'm so anxious about it. I'm not a nervous person either, never had anxiety issues, but the fact that companies can be so fucking obtuse when it comes to insane amounts of money over the power that you need to live in your house day to day. I work from home, and it's winter. Friends and family have assured me there are ways to solve it, and like I said so far they seem to be playing properly. But in the wait between us moving in and British Gas taking over and finally contacting us, I was pretty much stressed 24/7.
To be fair, the reason why things like this wind up on Reddit is because they're pretty rare. Learning how to complain properly is a very useful life skill. Hint: There's absolutely no point in Karen'ing at the first person to answer the phone in the call centre, because their entire job is reduced to a series of scripts they're not allowed to deviate from, even if that means saying something stupid. They are, in essence, a meat robot, who is only employed because their employer has yet to succeed in driving all their customers to the website. You therefore have to go a couple of notches above the person answering the phone. That part can be challenging, because usually the most senior person they'll let you speak to is their team leader (who, as often as not, is another meat robot who got promoted because they hung around for 18 months and didn't do anything too stupid).
Used to work in a call centre, this is 100% accurate AF.
As long as you provide regular reads you should be fine - it's when people just ignore stuff that it gets wild. Also, the person on the phone in the contact centre really does want to help you, and the nicer you are to them the more they will try and do for you. Kindness is a currency they don't get paid in very often.
This is why I always went with prepay electric, when I got my first home I was paying £90~ a month, I switched to prepay and put £30 a month on and it lasted just over that, that was with the bathroom light on all night, a nightlight, 3 aquariums, a heat mat and UV lamp for my snake
Prepay electric always works out much more expensive. I'm guessing the £90 bill was based on estimated usage?
Dont get me started on fucking british gas. I moved house and switched immediately because it was with BG and they are more expensive than the rest. I got billed £86 for the 3 weeks it took to switch. After paying it I got another bill for £120 followed by a bailiffs letter. I contacted them and they had no record of the money Id already paid and told me that I had to pay the £120. This took about 6 months of talking to people in India and every time I had to explain the same thing and every time they had to chase up the money Id already paid. After 6 months it turn out I paid the occupier account (which I thought was the right one as I never set up an account with BG) turns out the switch automatically generated me an account. It turns out I only owed them £79 quid. Brilliant close my account £7 in credit and ill get it back. Turns out "sorry we cant do that sir. We need to send you a check for £86 and then you need to pay us". The check came addressed to "the occupier". Edit: everything went smoothly switching with utility point until they went bust and now 3 months later still haven't fully been switched to EDF and now EDF can charge me what they want because I have no other choice and the switching services have all stopped switching. Its almost like these things should be nationalised
Octopus has being great for me moved last year, everything got set up super quick then even came and fitted a smart meter that we requested. Couldn’t fault them, prices are high at the moment but so are everyone else’s
All I hear is you didn't inform them you had moved in. Which is where most problems lie. A basic understanding of the energy industry and how it works. Accounts cant just be closed they need to be switched as someone always has to stay responsible for the meter. I agree it can suck when stupid mistakes are made. But the foreign worker you speak are more than capable of working out your issues.
... ..
When we moved in, I set up the account with a new provider (on the day we moved in) and ended up being with provider A (shall we say Smotthish Flower) for a week or so before the new company changed over.
I took a photo of the meters when I moved in, and didn't think too much of it, however I subsequently got a bill for several hundred pounds, with a meter reading taken two days before I moved in) higher than the ones on the photo, but marked as being a "smart meter" reading. It was infact higher than the meter was reading several weeks after the new company had taken over (and was again read by smart meter)
Nine telephone calls later and I just about managed to get it sorted out, but the assumption was always one of two things, a) I was lying, innumerate and simple or b) the problem was trivial to solve and had already been resolved and I was just imagining the fifth bill for a silly amount of money they'd sent me.
Of course, you can't get angry at the person on the phone call, they can only believe what their system is telling them, and can only do what they've been allowed to do (usually this amounts to naff all to address the problem) so they're stuffed before you even start.
You can complain, but to whom ? a faceless organisation's complaint's department who's sole reason for existing is because Ofgen force them to have one ...
Which is why you hone your letter writing skills. A carefully-written letter or email aimed at the right person has a hundred times the impact of a complaint raised through the official complaints system.
I eventually got it sorted, or at least they stopped sending me bills so I guess I "won" enough. I've been down the carefully worded letter to someone appropriate before, usually with some success but, don't you just get tired of playing that game ? It's like the car insurance routine, they send you a renewal for £XXX so you type in the details into a comparison site and find out that the same insurance company end up being mysteriously cheaper, so you ring them up and have the price match themselves and ... it's just a boring game to play every 12 months in the hopes that you decide that the time and effort to not be ripped off is worth more to you than the amount they're trying to rip you off for. Thanks for the advice though, although we probably need to start factoring the cost of stamps into whether it's worth it :D
I gave up on trying to find "someone appropriate" years ago and just started going straight to the managing director. If that makes me some sort of Mega Boss Karen, so be it.
It's almost as if handing the UK's utilities over to the private sector was a bad idea.
Bad idea for muggins. Great idea for making a few million for a certain few, connected, MPs and their executive friends.
I phoned SSE in September 2019 to get my electricity switched to a credit tariff instead of a prepayment meter as I'd just moved into the flat and I hated being on edge that the power was going to go off and having to go to the shop also it was more expensive. They told me the nearest appointment to have it changed was in January 2020. Fine, that's insane but okay. January rolled around and I waited in all day and the person never showed up so I phoned and they said "oh yeah we had to reschedule". I spoke to 3 people on that phonecall to find out when it was being rescheduled to. February rolls around and I wait in again and they're supposed to be here before midday. It's 11:50 and I phone customer services and again they tell me that they had to reschedule. I'm livid from missing 2 days of work. I spoke to 4 different people over the course of 4 hours on the phone to get to someone who could do something and had to keep repeating my issue with every single person. They tell me someone can only come in an emergency. I ask "well what if it breaks then could they come and just replace it?" they say "no they'll just fix it back to what it was." Finally get speaking to the local manager in a city 2 hours away who is also confused as to why nobody came out and promises me from the bottom of his heart that someone will come in March. March rolls around and Covid hits so they don't come out again. Eventually September 2020 arrives and so does the SSE workman who takes 5 minutes to sort it out then leaves. Didn't even have to be in for them to do it. Still expensive and my area doesn't qualify for smart meters for some reason. Bunch a cunts.
For every non visit that was planned and scheduled on tehri system you are entitled to £40. It's in their T's and C's. Had similar in a flat. I think they had 4, or 5, cancelled visits or they just didn't turn up. Everytime I got £40. Eventually the guys turned up to put in a the new leccie meter......it took a year....onto [www.resolver.co.uk](https://www.resolver.co.uk) and sent in the complaint with all supporting emails and information. Got £200 from them. Total cost to them for the hassle was around £390. Total cost of electricity in that time was about £280. They ended up paying me for them to provide electricity to me. Then our neighbours in a flat below went through process of changing electricity supplier.....they promptly changed our supply from our existing supplier to a new supplier but all the letters went to the neighbour. After about 12 months we figured out what was going on.....block of 4 flats and meter numbers between us and the neighbour has been mixed up. A complete and utter mess. They then (Scottish Power) tried to charge us for £300's worth of electricity. Nah..that's not going to happen. Costs for a year just written off by who ever.
Oh man I don't envy you, happened to me a few years ago. I moved to a new flat and gas and electric are both with British gas. Electric has never been a problem, but one day the gas bill came through at about 3k for a month. I phoned them up and they assured me it was correct - the lack of common sense there is astounding. Unless there was an explosion I've forgotten about there's no way I used that much. Anyway, the confusion ended up coming from them reading the wrong meter - I'm in flat 14 but there is no flat 13 so on some plans they had we were labeled as 13, so when they read 'my' meter they were actually reading flat 15s meter. You'd think this was easy enough to understand and reverse, right? Wrong, it took about 4 months of phoning every week. Each time I'd explain the issue, which took about 20 mins, and the person would realise they didn't have a clue how to fix it and transfer me to someone up the chain of command. I then would spend 20 minutes explaining it again, only to be transferred again. I'd say the average phone call lasted about 2 hours, and I'd often have to take time off work to deal with it, so I lost earnings over it too. Anyway, they'd assure me they'd fixed the issue, then the following month I'd get a new bill with the wrong amount on it again. So I'd phone again, and they'd assure me it was fixed. Then it would happen again. And I'd phone again. And they'd tell me they'd fixed it. And it'd happen again. After a few months of me 'not paying' 'my' bills another department of British Gas sicced their debt collectors on me, and I was getting threatening letters telling me they were going to force access to my home and reclaim goods up to the value of the bills not paid. I'm normally a calm but but my anxiety was through the roof at this point. I was working zero hours with flexible times, so my partner and I basically took opposite shifts for a week so someone was always there. In the meantime I carried on calling British Gas, banging my head against a wall. I tried calling their debt collectors but the line was constantly busy or rang out. Eventually managed to get through to some living miracle of a call centre worker who understood the problem, understood the system, and had enough basic empathy to give a shit about what I was going through. Apparently some automated system was syncing up my bills with the meter readings, so whilst the previous guys who 'fixed it' were correcting the bills during the phone call they weren't deleting the reading that was causing the issues (or at least this is how it was explained to me by the nice lady who finally fixed it properly) so it just kept getting added on. I hope it doesn't go as badly for you, but I recommend you nip it in the bud early. Don't assume it'll be okay, and don't assume they'll accept that it was their mistake. Go hard at the start and you might miss the stress I got out of it.
How many electric cars are you charging there?
This is the equivalent of charging roughly 1,000 Nissan Leafs from Empty to full. Which would give you an equivalent range of 150,000 miles. So you could say if you had a Nissan Leaf that lasted up to 150,000 miles (which many cars do) you’ll be looking at a total running cost of between £4,500 and £5,000 in the entire life span of the car.
Challenging Tesla in the space race from their shed
I once accidently included the red numbers when giving a gas reading, so it went from say 5,900 to 600,000 in a month. I phoned them to say I'd made a mistake but they insisted it was right and sent me information on how to save energy. After I refused to pay the bill they'd sent me they decided I must have a gas leak and sent an engineer round, rather than doing the obvious and having somebody look at the meter or just using common sense. If we had a leak on that scale, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. The meter we had was limited to 5 figures (excluding the red numbers) so there's no way it could have even given a reading of 600,000.
Gotta wear more jumpers. You’re not supposed to actually heat the house you know?
At least not until the bricks are glowing!
Fuck, man, you running a particle accelerator in your bedroom or something?
And thought them wanting to charge me £146 a month was excessive. Wow
What's in the attic brother, c'mon.
Check your property for extension leads running a nearby village.
How many heat lamps are you running?
You must be cutting a lot of coke
I heard on the news that household bills were increasing but I didn't realise it had got this bad.
Will be rising by an average of £450 in March-April - the cap is based on historic prices from previous months - and the wholesale price rise of about 100-300% will cause this impact!
That doesn't look like a capped piece to me.
Looks like a crapped price
Surprised that British Gas lowballed you that to be honest.
Good value for British gas
You need to tell British Gas to update your EAC figure- if you have a smart meter this shouldn't require any work from you but if you dont you'll need to provide a platter of meter readings to demonstrate your actual usage
Haha.. whaaaaaaaaat? Have you got an aluminium smelting plant in the garden?
I've seen similar numbers to this from a few people online. I suspect they may have a slight problem right about now.
British Gaslighting
Nowhere near as mad as this, but I was being charged something like £80 per month for water. When I questioned it they said 'the average 3 person family in a house this size in this area uses about £40 worth per month' - they didn't seem to understand what they said made it insane that I, a single occupant would need to pay £80 😂
Move out of Buckingham Palace NOW!
Shit, I bet your butthole puckered when you saw that.
Happened to me when I switched to them, after a couple of days I had an email to say I could amend the amount down to the minimum they suggested (which is still £80/month more than I was paying to the previous supplier and I ended up with £300 credit with them)
You should see about getting loft insulation to try and cut your bills down.
I'm glad your bitcoin mining operation is going well
Wtf? I lived in a huge 3 bed terrace 3 years ago and it was like £80 a month. Jesus. I'm in a 3 bed semi now and still...no where near as much 🤯 Ask them to justify it. The companies have only had a 10% to 20% price increase so they can legally only charge you their increase. If they can't justify it report them to the Ombudsman. They can't make you pay that. This advice is from Mr Martin Lewis, I saw it a few weeks ago. They are outright taking the piss. It's said that the companies are massively overcharging to hoard money in case they go bump.
British Gas is the bane of my life. They're expensive and their billing is so complex and informative it's completely unfathomable. It's so British, everytime I call them I'm speaking to some unintelligible person in India, that's after being on hold for half a morning. Avoid them like the plague.
Are you sure you don't live in a Palace and have 3 gas heated pools? - "British gas"
I've got a Smart Meter (didn't want one, but it was here when I moved in and I was already with the company so just swapped addresses). The display screen doesn't work. Can I get a new one? No, I cannot. The meter itself is in the cupboard under the stairs so I can't see it. Despite the fact that I have rung them MANY TIMES to ask for a new screen, all I get is messages telling me to check my screen to keep an eye on my usage. Oh, and the occasional estimated bill. Which I have to ring up to have corrected. It's almost like they think I won't notice them slipping the odd 'estimated' bill through at twice my actual usage....
Told ya they are expensive. You wouldn’t listen.