We got our bill at the normal time this month and an email to say what our new balance is, only they seem to have forgotten to charge for our electricity import. We got charged for gas and credited for exports. Anybody else had similar billing issues? I don't think I will bother chasing it up because free electricity is no problem for us!
nophead yep, recently my bills have been all over the place with one of the three elements missing most of the time or with different end dates. It's only my recent bills that has all of them on, ending on the same date. Have you changed tariff or anything recently?
No we haven't changed anything and the last bill was normal, other than it being split for the price change.
nophead Yes, I've had exactly this on 3 of the last 4 months. The problem is that a single missed meter reading (such as from a power cut) seems to break their automated billing.
Unfortunately, T&C for smart tariffs typically say that on any day they can't get all the half-hour readings, they will bill you on the standard tariff rates.
DD Unfortunately, T&C for smart tariffs typically say that on any day they can't get all the half-hour readings, they will bill you on the standard tariff rates.
They can sod off with that. The data is on the meter for 13 months (import)/3 months (export) and its their job to get DCC to pull it again if its missing.
Vestas
Is that true on smet1?
Asking ‘cos my export graph has disappeared from app & portal and I am arming up to fight.
Have emailed to moan today!
Vestas Except that when there's a power cut, the data isn't on the meter either.
The last couple of times it's happened to me, a reading was mistimed for some reason - a few minutes early. So it did resolve fine without reverting to flexible billing. First time (due to a power cut) they did charge me, but some reason, meter was set with 2 registers, so they billed me at E7 rates, so it wasn't too bad. Didn't seem worth fighting over about 50p or so.
We did have a scheduled power cut for an hour. By definition we must have used zero units and exported 0 units so, what is the problem?
Watcher For SMETS1 it depends on the meter model AFAIK.
nophead
Yes, I had the same. I thought WOW! I'm really saving loads on my electricity costs, then reality kicked in and I thought " that can't be correct ". Sure enough the following months bill reflected the true usage.
nophead We did have a scheduled power cut for an hour. By definition we must have used zero units and exported 0 units so, what is the problem?
Yeah, you'd think it would be easy, wouldn't you. I believe there is a mechanism in smartmeter-world where it can actually send a last-gasp message to say it is losing power. But as in all things, it depends on whether the right information gets to the right people. (Perhaps there's no standard mechanism for DNO telling energy retailers about power cuts because they've never needed to know in the past.)
Though thinking about it now, maybe it wasn't a power cut, but it was when they came to fit an isolation switch in the meter tails (and so had to pull the fuse, which turned off the meter).
The power cut was something like 9 to 10am but since September, when we got solar and battery we have never imported during that time, so it would be odd if it was not zero when we had the power cut as it would be zero before and after that day and zero every other day apart for the miniscule inverter balancing errors.
nophead The power cut was something like 9 to 10am but since September, when we got solar and battery we have never imported during that time,
If you point that out to them when you report the problem, I'm sure they'll be willing to listen to reason. Last time I had to do it, I included the relevant lines from the downloaded CSV file, which were all miniscule. Oddly, they report them to about 20 decimal places, or 0E-20 for zero.
0E-20, 2023-12-30T07:00:00+00:00, 2023-12-30T07:30:00+00:00
0.00100000000000000000, 2023-12-30T07:30:00+00:00, 2023-12-30T08:00:00+00:00
0E-20, 2023-12-30T08:00:00+00:00, 2023-12-30T08:30:00+00:00
****
0E-20, 2023-12-30T08:27:36+00:00, 2023-12-30T08:57:36+00:00
****
0.00200000000000000000, 2023-12-30T09:00:00+00:00, 2023-12-30T09:30:00+00:00
0.00100000000000000000, 2023-12-30T09:30:00+00:00, 2023-12-30T10:00:00+00:00