To have not believed energy companies are THIS awful?

[mynamechangemyrules]

I got a letter saying my DD was going from £75 to £156. In a little fury, especially at the 'don't worry it's all done for you and we'll just whip the extra money out of your account despite your fuel not costing that much' letter, I cancelled my DD 🤪

Cue a letter which tells me my ACTUAL FUEL and the standing charge is HIGHER because I won't do direct debit. Is that even legal.?!

Anyway, I always pay and just about have the money but don't want to pay over the odds (I've only been in the UK 2 years and the first year I paid in full every 3 months with British Gas- OVO wouldn't allow this (will view it as defaulting if I leave it more than a month) despite me preferring/ asking for it upon opening an account.) At no point did BG mention that I was paying more- would I have been?!

Final bit of the boring saga- I decide last night that I'll sign up for the DD against my wishes just because I can't bear to pay more to not... Go onto the (shit) app and it says my calculated DD is £256 per month!! Obv I lose my mind. Then I think, well that's because I now owe this month plus creating a future direct debit. I decide to pay this month now and see about a DD later.

An hour later DD charge goes back down to £156. Surely they can't be that stupid that they can't work out that the £156 is still adequate it's just this is the heaviest usage month with Xmas lights and heating etc? (I hadn't missed a month of direct debit het as id cancelled well before the due date, IYSWIM so they wouldn't have lost out)

Not sure what I'm even ranting about now but the sooner our core utilities are back in public ownership the better. Why is anyone making a profit from selling goods which are essential to life?

Fuming abput the whole thing!

Yes, this is what I need to do. When I was in my little fury mode I couldn't see how to do it on the app and then it just kept redirecting me to 'help pages' which all ended up leading nowhere useful. Will do it now slightly calmer 😬😂

That’s interesting to hear, we had high hopes for Octopus but 9 months on are still waiting for them to solve a smart meter problem, and their customer service has been just as poor as other providers we have experienced.

Especially when they are making record profits.
We need to renationalise the energy companies asap.

I am also with OVO and had the same issue. They told me my dd would be £177 a month, which I disputed on the basis of the previous year's usage, so I made a one off payment of £150 which forced them to recalculate and that took a couple of weeks.

Then I got an email saying my DD would be £165, so I made a one off payment of £50, which created another delay. By then my actual usage for the next month was available and made them recalculate again. I have a log burner and rely on that a lot in the winter.

I carried on forcing their wretched computer to recalculate every two weeks by making smaller & smaller cash payments. My dd is now £103 and I'm £93 in credit which is about where it should be for this time of year.

Agree that energy cos should be publicly owned. Ovo and the like just help themselves to people's bank accounts to finance their companies and it has to stop.

Absolute crooks

e.on tried to tell me I had spent £380 in three days when they changed my smart meter, rather than accept it was obviously their issue.

and then quoted me £150 a month direct debit for a small house only using electricity and not gas. we submit our meter readings instead and it’s never more than £80 a month so they are obviously really ripping people off

I can't imagine why anyone thinks nationalising anything is a solution.

You'd have a state run monopoly providing the same level of service as the worst of the current suppliers and no means of taking your business elsewhere.

There are good energy suppliers - take your custom elsewhere.

The alternative is to build a society where the only people who don't pay are thieves not poor and so get prosecuted

That would require raising taxes which people won't vote for so this is the alternative... you pay either way but in one case people benefit on average and in the other the benefit is to businesses ...

It's win win to a Tory government , low taxes and money to their pals

The 'direct debit on actual usage' system should have been available from the start.

What really pissed me off was I had a truly patronising conversation with Ovo customer services. I haven't missed a bill of any sort in 42 years despite being a single mum, and they still maintained that I needed their 'help' to budget effectively. I really dont ! And won't, ever! Arrogant sods.

All companies do this. The energy companies are just forced to make it public.

Why? it worked for decades, privatisation caused prices to rise as the consumer has to pay for all the billing companies that failed.

There is no competition, Ofgem set the cap and all energy suppliers charge that per unit price, with just Octopus charging 2p per day less for the criminal standing charge which penalises low users.

How on earth can you have "competition" when energy prices set globally and suppliers tied to infrastructure owned by National Grid?

Why would any company invest in "customer service" ?

Even Ofgem recognise the poor levels of CS but wont do anything about, as they are the suppliers champion, not the consumers.

Rubbish, a truly private company would go bust if customers didn't pay, as they would try to increase prices to cover losses but consumers would go elsewhere.

Energy supply is a rigged market, so much like retail banking, these suppliers cannot fail, its as far removed from privatisation as you could possibly get, the worst of both worlds.

I am with BG and pay the actual bill quarterly by DD, so benefit from the DD discount. I had to call them to arrange this, they don't make it easy! I just put money aside in a savings account each month so that I benefit from the interest and not BG.

Refunds aren't automated, the direct debit changes are. I can't speak for anyone else but I always issue a refund immediately providing the account has up to date meter readings.

All companies have bad debts/thefts and charge you more to cover them. You pay more to your supermarket to cover thefts, your credit card interest is a little bit higher to cover all those who don’t pay. The only reason you’re seeing this in energy is that it’s up to the regulator to allow it or not

I'm with Utility Warehouse and they refund the credit once a year. I really like them (promise I don't work for them!) and you get to speak to a human relatively quickly as well.

@ineedanothertree Exactly!

I like the sound of Octopus with the lower standing charge as we are low energy users and I find that charge painful. Utility Warehouse sounds good too.

Although I can't be bothered with the faff of moving- and for so little benefit- another false promise of privatisation, but it keeps us all quiet as we read MSE and swap companies to save ourselves our 2p standing charge, while the companies maintain nice fat profits...

Octopus - ah yes the ones who installed a smart meter and then wanted to charge my DPs £5000 for the 3 months of gas used whilst they were ignoring the fact it wasn't recording gas usage. A small well insulated 2 bed bungalow.

I'm with them but refuse to let them install a smart meter. They are always messing with my DDM too, generally upwards although we are over £2K in credit with them. To their credit they always back down when I ring up and make a fuss but I really shouldn't have to.

I’m with Octopus and almost every month they tell me my direct debit is doubling, despite my usage being within the current amount. So every month I change the direct debit amount back to something I’m happy with. On the odd occasion my bill is higher I make a top up payment so I never fall behind.
I don’t know whether the other companies have as much flexibility with changing the direct debit, but you can certainly change it to suit you with Octopus.

Also, Octopus keep asking me to get a smart meter and I just ignore it.

You mention profits again but don’t you remember all those suppliers going out of business. The profits for suppliers are tiny and that’s part of the problem, and the reason why the ofgem cap now protects suppliers from going under rather than protect consumers

its generators making money, not suppliers

Eon tried telling me that increasing my direct debit would be doing me a favour as I'd be in credit and I'd have a buffer. I'd rather have my money in my savings and earn interest on it myself thank you!

I've always found mine pretty reasonable. They even lowered my DD to £8 when I got a lot in credit (I am sure it will go back up again when they work through the money).

I thought that some time ago the government gave them a shot across the bows re making the dds more reasonable and not allowing them to build up masses of credit.

I don't know how their algorithms for calculating dds work, but maybe your short account history makes you look a credit risk and therefore they want larger payments because it is the expensive time of year. After all the whole point of dd is to even out the payments over a year, not to extend people credit, which costs money.

I'm pretty sure you can go back to paying for what you use directly at any time.

Yep they're evil, I'm with British Gas and the same happened to me, I rarely put the heating on but I'm menopausal and permanently hot atm, it's a fucking disgrace they profit so much for people to have basic human rights.
I'm gonna vote for Gina Millers True & Fair party in the general election in a desperate pathetic attempt to get things reformed.

They aren't tiny at all, BG (not Centrica) made almost £1 billion in 2022/23 after Ofgem allowed them to increase prices to claw back profits they would have made when prices soared but Ofgem kept prices lower.

So in other words we all paid anyway.

...and this is what they do with this profit:

Earnings at British Gas, which has about 7.5mn customers, were boosted by higher margins on gas and electricity sold to consumers, the company said on Thursday as it set out plans to increase its dividend and extend a share buyback plan

So much for investment in supplies and infrastructure.

We are a bunch of mugs putting up with this, let alone defending it.

I have a direct debit set up to take off the exact amount of the bill each month. I would rather the money was in my account than theirs!

I don't have gas, on oil so my usage is pretty much the same all year round.
I think you are entitled to request this.

I'm with SO Energy who are a bit better than EON who I was last with. Bit slow to reply sometimes though.