I used the moneysupermarket comparison site and switched to npower with a dual fuel direct debit of £178 per month a slight saving from British Gas. A year on having never missed a payment I was told I owed a further £2500 - effectively I should have been paying double - hardly a saving. Npower say is because I went through a third party - yourselves! - Even though I filled in all the required criteria I was apparently put on a low user tarriff -totally unsuitable for a large 4-bed house with 5 adults. Having reassessed meter readings npower have whittled my bill to £1915.51, offered me a £50 "goodwill gesture" and payment plan! No thank you. There is a much bigger principle here.Anybody else had similar experiences?

Hi Katy,

Have you checked your usage for the last year. 178 per month sounds high, though it is a 4 bedroom, so expecting to pay more on top of that sounds extortionate.

I would consider writing a complaint to NPower about this as clearly that monthly amount is not a low usage cost, nor is the fact that they didn't highlight the incorrect tariff to you at any point.

A comparison on this site using the annual usage and the other details should indicate the type of tariff that you should be on.

HTH

Sparky.

katyb:

Regardless of the reason you quote something else not quite right must have happenned. This is because regardless of customer service concerns, the headline cost of an approriate NPower tariff switched online would be amongst the cheapest on the market in most areas, not £2000 more expensive.

Post some meter reading and tariff details and it may be possible to see the problem.

Hi Katyb,

I'm sorry, I've only just spotted your post. I've forwarded it to our customer services team and asked them to respond, but I fear that 5pm on a Friday might be a bit late - they probably won't come back to you until Monday.

I will double check first thing next week that they've recieved my message. In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend.

Thanks,

Felicity

Hi, thanks for your interest. Just to be clear 178 is for both gas and electricity - I was paying around 200 to British Gas so it wasn't as if it was suspiciously too good to be true. Ignorance is bliss and I had no idea of the problem until British Gas contacted me to ask me to return to them, saying they were the cheapest provider and offering a 50 pound loyalty bonus.

It was only when npower rang me asking me to stay that+

they dropped the bombshell that I was 2,500 in arrears. Since then there has been a deluge of phone calls, letters and emails. The bottom line is they say had I dealt with them directly they could have assessed my usage better and blame the third party website. But on their figures I would hardly have switched providers to pay substantially more. If anything our fuel consumption would have dropped as we replaced a gas fire with a woodburning stove last winter.

Npower have sent me a copy of the bill which I should have received in February - which I didn't otherwise alarm bells would have rang sooner - and have apologised for not reassessing my direct debit payments. Each customer service rep I have spoken to seems to have a different spin on why my bill is so high. One tried to say I must have given inaccurate data to moneysupermarket, another joked that I must be lighting up the whole street - my how I laughed! - and another blamed the tarriff (Sign Online 11).

katyb:

I'm sorry you can't be that much in arrears paying £178/month unless the previous £200/month to British Gas was hopelessly low.

There must be another reason but if you want help as opposed to a rant about NPower you will need to post some meter readings.

In its day Sign Online 11 was a very competitive tariff.

katyb:

and another blamed the tarriff (Sign Online 11).

In bold below is from the Energy Savings trust site at the time this tariff was released.

The new SOL 11 tariff is 10.4 per cent more expensive than its predecessor, but moneysupermarket.com claims it is still one of the cheapest tariffs available - although customers in the midlands and Yorkshire may find better deals elsewhere.

I agree with Jalexa, if you post your meter readings and the rates that applied against each statement, someone may be able to work out whether there is mistake somewhere. Perhaps a dodgy meter reading or calculation?

Huckster

katyb:

Another thought about this. When you switched from British Gas to NPower, who took the closing meter readings? Did you get a refund from British Gas or did you have to pay a final account to British Gas? Have you checked that the closing readings on the British Gas bill is exactly the same as the opening reading on the NPower bill?

Hi Katyb,

Customer services tell me they've emailed you and will be contacting you by phone today, so I hope they can help you get to the bottom of this.

Many thanks,

Felicity

Hi Jalexa, As far as I can remember - it was over a year ago - British Gas took the readings and I was in credit at the time of the switch over and received a refund. I have been told there was some discrepancy on npower's estimated readings, hence the reduction from 2,500 to just under 2,000. Do I detect a hint of bias here or are you completely inpartial as far as npower goes?

As for my rant, I get pretty steamed up when someone promises to get back to me then doesn't. Npower's number was always busy and when you pressed the ring back option you got cut off. Very frustrating. Eventually I got a letter saying someone has tried to contact me by phone but been unable to reach me which was a blatant lie. No message had been left on my answering machine at home nor a call logged on my mobile. To be fair npower have since been very responsive and have accelerated my dispute to their complaints team.

As for the readings, I must admit I am very lax on this. I had been with British Gas for donkeys years and relied on them sending quarterly bills and adjusting my payments according to my usage, as did British Telecom with my phone bills. I pay everything through direct debit or standing order and everything has always run like clockwork. Till now.

My beef is that npower are blaming the "the third party website" - moneysupermarket - saying that unless you deal with them directly they cannot correctly assess your usage and get the right tarriff. What a cop out! It is like taking insurance out through a comparison site, paying your premiums then in the event of a bump being told sorry we got your quote wrong.

I am lucky in that I can afford to pay any arrears but if the system is flawed other customers could switch to npower because they think they are saving money only to be faced with a big bill a year later.

katyb:

Do I detect a hint of bias here or are you completely inpartial as far as npower goes?

Sorry that you have to cast such an aspersion. I think if you look at my postings over the last few months you (and others) will see a clear answer to that suggestion.

And you might learn how better to deal with such supplier behaviour.

huckster:

The new SOL 11 tariff is 10.4 per cent more expensive than its predecessor, but moneysupermarket.com claims it is still one of the cheapest tariffs available - although customers in the midlands and Yorkshire may find better deals elsewhere.

That's an interesting quote. Other articles at the time also mention that SOL 10 customers kept their existing rates. I do not know for how long, nor whether SOL 11 customers (katyb's tariff) kept their tariffs when SOL 11 was superceded.

However an indicative comparison now on accredited price comparison websites suggest that SOL 11 rates are competitive with currently available tariffs. NP now up to SOL 16.

So no obvious explanation for the OPs problem.

Incorrect meter readings or a faulty meter look like a potential reason for mass electricity usage.

I'd compare the final meter readings from British Gas, and the opening by NPower as previously suggested and look at the current meter reading to provide an amount of electricity consumed, and using their own calculation (on the back of the bill) see how much you should have been charged.

Check what this would have been on a monthly basis and how far out the monthly DD is.

You bills do sound high IMO.

Sparky.

I totally sympathise with katyb. To say that the energy suppliers have created a minefield would be a total understatement. The worst part of all is that they all seem to have total freedom to suddenly change (ie increase!) their charges without notice and, worse still, without letting you know they've changed until your next bill arrives - months later!

I'm with npower and went onto their Sign Online 11 tariff in May 2008 after seeing that it was the best deal for me on moneysupermarket and other comparison sites. When my next electricity bill arrived in June 2009 (yes, 13 months later!) I saw that the rates had increased in August 2008 from 26.95p/4.87p (first 728kWh / remainder) to 13.02p/11.63p. Our annual electricity consumption is around 5,800kWh, so nearly tripling the charge for the majority of our usage came as a painful shock (pun intended). Not surprisingly, after 8.5 months at a much higher rate my account balance was very much in the red.

I did get a gas bill in October 2008 where I discovered an increase from 5.977p/1.89p to 8.629p/2.098p, but accepted this as an inevitable but not too painful rise (typical annual gas consumption 34,600kWh).

The upshot of all this was that my monthly Direct Debit payments for electricity had to increase from £42.00 to £110.00 to catch up with the new rate and pay off the high balance. Meanwhile, the monthly gas payments had increased from npower’s original estimate of £39.00 to £121.00 because our usage was higher than they had predicted. It’s exactly the same house as it was when the previous owners were here before September 2007 and they were also with npower, so how the estimates could be so far out I can’t understand.

I SHOULD be getting another bill in September, so hopefully I’ll be able to see how everything has panned out. I’m hoping that I don’t have to continue paying £231 a month for my energy.

I was spurred into looking at the figures yesterday when a cold-calling representative from EDF assured me that their charges would be lower than whatever I was paying – not difficult! I took his figures and said I would look at them. On our typical usage, the annual costs worked out at £1830.79 or £152.57 a month. That sounded promising. When I checked out online what npower could offer, Sign Online 16 worked out at £1716.26 or £143.02 a month – better still. So I phoned npower and quickly got through to Simon in Customer Services. He carefully calculated the figures for gas and electricity then told me that I was best off staying with SOL 11 for gas and switching to SOL 16 for electricity – an interesting combination I hadn’t thought of. This brought the total estimate down to £1598.02 or £133.17 a month – a total saving on my existing tariff of about £200 per year. So of course I switched straight away.

The moral of my story is that we should all take the advice to check on the best rates available EVERY 12 months. It’s all extremely complicated but worth the effort. Perhaps the simplest thing to do is to phone your supplier and say you’re thinking of switching so what is the best deal they can offer. It worked for me.