Advice please if anyone out there understands electricity billing…..
I currently pay £60/month for electricity from Scottish Power – each year they send me a Direct Debit review and say everything is hunky dory, and adjust the DD up and down a wee bit, but never anything drastic. I go by their word (perhaps naively) when they say my bill is covered blah blah. Just out of curiosity i went into my account login with them today – it says i am £2700 in debit. Im confused how this can be, but at the moment there is no answer from them to enquire. In a bit of state of shock i adjusted my DD upto £100 a month as i hate owing money. My forecast is then that i will be over £3000 in debit come this time next year?!? I am seriously confused about this. Can anyone offer advice as to what is going on? I am assuming that in debit means in debt to them..yes?

Depends how the dd is setup, normally you monthly amount is slightly more than you use in the summer so your in credit.

It’s sounds to me your dd is too low as that’s only £15 per week??

Also nearly 3k is too much unless you smash the gas in the winter??

Ideally you need to speak to them to clarify, to compare I have a 3 bed semi and I use average amounts with 2 kids – house is never cold but not Barbados.

I pay £140 per month and always in credit

£60/month is about average (by average I mean UK wide) – the standard dual fuel bill is £1300 odd split between gas and leccy so your DD is (and from the OP has been) fine.

I’d wait for them to respond before panicking, but as a check for a dodgy meter, unplug everything and see if the meter is still running.

unless you’ve taken up cannabis growing this year, in which case, delete this thread.

When was the last time you or they read the meter?

Is it genuine or estimated?

When did you last check your account?

is it mansion with electric heating and a immersion heater + working from home ?

3 bed semi both working out here 32 quid a month – electric shower/hob/oven , LED lighting throughout internally and external + oil heating.

That online thing is rubbish. We’ve gone from £3000 in credit to owing £150 in a day.
Have they sent you a proper bill in the last year? We weren’t and thanks to someone on here we were able to claim for all the unbilled electricity. £1300 thank you STW.
They agreed to let us cancel a 2 year contract half way through as they agreed they were rubbish.
Go with Ovo.

ovo dont seem that good if your a below average user…..

im a scottish gas customer – i use 200 ish kwh a month.

they want slightly more than i currently pay for that currently….

I recently had to deal with Scottish power. Took a while to get through but pleasantly surprised.

Reduced my DD by 1/3rd and refund of ~£300 received in under a week as I’d been overpaying.

2 bed, I pay £58 month duel fuel, Id suggest you look at your consumption, check the meter reading and send in updated reading online.

I recently left Scottish Power after I checked on line to find my account was nearly 2 k in credit and they’d not reduced the DD. They were reasonable at returning the amount owed to me but it was more the principal that they’d have happily carried on over charging me if I hadn’t noticed. Moved to ovo and hope they’ll be a bit better.

Go back online and see if it’s an estimate.

If so, stop worrying and just send in your meter readings – it’ll automatically adjust.

FWIW Scottish Power put our DD to £1 about 18 months ago as we’d overpaid (end of summer, what did they expect).

At some point I’m sure they come back and tell us we owe them £x and the DD needs to be raised vastly. Until that point, I’ll keep my money ta. 🙂

They put in SAP a while back and I’m not sure they’ve managed to get through the chaotic backlog yet.

Call them and see what they say … I’m surprised they would allow the account to be that much in debt.

Are you using electricity to heat the house?

If you have been billed using estimated readings and then given an actual meter reading this give you large unpaid balance.
Go back and check your bills as they should also have a statement balance showing your brought forward balance less payments received plus the current bill.

BTW. You’d never have got away with that had you been on Npower. It would have been the other way round and you’d have no chance of getting your money back.

Weird that this has happened. Until recently, we were with Scottish Power & had been for a few years. Every time there was a disparity between our DD and our current usage, we would get a letter telling us that the DD would be adjusted up or down to match what we were using.

Admittedly, the last one was a bit stupid in that they wanted to double the DD at the END of winter, as we had accumulated a bit of a debit – the fact it would more than likely be evened out by the lower summer bills fell on deaf ears, although we did manage to get a reduced DD, compared to their proposal. Still ended up with a credit by the end of the summer, as I predicted & had told them we would…..

Now with OVO – it was cheaper & the customer service (so far) is very good.
Website easy to use & bills easy to understand.

Useful fact that they don’t seem to publicise – with SSE you can still get the “direct debit” discount if paying by standing order

I suspect others will still be the same.

Means that you can stop all this random changing of payments.

They were never able to explain August 3rd to me.
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They were never able to explain August 3rd to me.

Maybe that was when they moved you onto the new system, and/or moved over some transactions. As said, they’ve been having ‘issues’.

was august 3rd not the day you discovered you had put your meter reading in or read your meter wrong …. i recall there being a facepalming thread from your self.

No. I was an idiot in July!