Be Excellent To Each Other

I received a very strange letter from Southern Electric, my gas/leccy provider, yesterday. It told me that prices would be increasing from 25th August 2008.

The letter was dated October.

Am I going fecking mental or can they seriously tell me they're raising prices as from 2 months ago?

That's a bit odd. I'd seek clarification, as they can't retroactively charge you, as far as I'm aware.

Ooh wait, unless you pay quarterly in arrears? You might not have been billed for August yet.

Well I pay a DD every month at a rate intended to cover the quarterly bills, but I'm still not sure how they can tell me that the electricity I've been using for the last two months is suddenly going to cost me more.

I'm not either. Ring them.

I shall, I was rather hoping for a bit of precedent I could cite that says they're not allowed retrospective rate increases. Grrr.

I could find out for you, if you like? I do work for an energy company, after all...

Hey no wonder you're the only one replying to this thread.

If that's something that's not too much hassle to do, I'd be much obliged, ta

Not great news:

*investigates*

Posted where? How can I expect to know if I'm not directly informed?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sho ... ?t=1226791

This is extremely handy info.

Cheers Myp!

From:
http://www.consumerfocus.org.uk

Interestingly the letter I received was merely dated 'October 2008', with no specific date.

I'm sure that's completely deliberate. They might attempt to claim they sent the letter at the very start of October, giving me much less time to switch.

Yeah, they're arseholes. I'm just quite glad I don't work for the Retail side of the business.

Any dates on the envelope itself?

But yeah every trick in the book and some extras! Although they did write off lots of money due to them being tools for me! yes!

No, it's always that generic franked stuff that never contains a date. Sigh.

CG, are you OK?

I mean, you're faced with bureaucratic treachery here, they are ripping you off by almost anyone's standard, and the best you can come up with is "Sigh"?!

The CG I know would already be burning the Managing Director's dog on his own lawn. Or at least composing a strongly worded blog post.

Oh I'm fine, I've just returned home to find another threatening letter from npower saying my non-existant account is now very overdue and they're soon to try and CCJ me. Naturally, I'm calm about that.

Oh god he's passed through anger and he's broken through into zen.

EVERYBODY DOWN!

Ah, Npower! You should have said. I once had to hound them every month for two years to actually send me a bill. But before they got around to doing that, they set the debt collectors on me. I then ignored them for about 6 months just to be difficult.

I eventually raged at them until they a) fucked off and b) gave me a substantial discount on the bill, and promptly switched to ecotricity.

Rage them: it's the only language they understand.

It's like in Scanners where he'll crush peoples minds with telekinetic force.

Npower are twats. When I started using them they set my monthly direct debit amount at 23.00 a month. I thought that sounded about right for a single guy in a one-bedroomed flat with no heating.

6 months later they said I'd used something like £120 a month in electricity and raised my monthly direct debit payment to 73.00 a month. I got paranoid for a while and thought someone was tapping into my energy supply, but started trying to conserve more energy anyway.

6 months later they brought it back down to 28.00 a month.

6 months later, it went up to 56.00 a month.

Then I switched to Scottish Power and now pay 36.00 a month.

Also Npower's home energy consultants Make Shit Up when they try to get you to switch.

Given the capitalisation, I'm going to assume they're actually called that. At least you can't fault their honesty.

That still seems pretty high. Mind you, we have gas heating, so that brings down the leccy bill. Our current one for a two bed flat in London was about 80 quid for three months, and we're proper leccy whores at times.

How much are you paying per kWh unit though?

Not sure, other than it went up massively halfway through the last billing period.

Why oh why oh fucking why, in this day and age, do we not have leccy meters that plug into the phone line and tell the company the exact amount they should bill you each month?

Laziness, and potential for abuse I suppose. Implementation of things like that are so cack-handed you'll get smart people breaking whatever pisspoor security there is and forge their data

Fuck that, I want my flying car first.

Doesn't matter, you can still do meter reads for conformation.

Hah, you trust the meter reading spods to get it right?
My meter is a humungous ancient 3-phase one. It has no '1/10ths of a unit' digit, only a '1 unit' digit.

So where it asks you to put the meter reading in, I helpfully put in the number of units and '0' in the last box, which is after the decimal point. This is usually 10 times more than the previous reading, because when the meter reader comes around, he takes down the number so that the '1' digit is *after* the decimal point.

Then the computer decides that since the reading is a factor of ten out, someone has fucked up, so they send out a massively wrong estimated bill and then you send them the reading again AND THEN THE METER READER PERSON COMES AROUND TO GET TEH TRUE READING and he takes down the number so that the '1' digit is *after* the decimal point, so it's now a factor of 10 out again.

etc

I could go on.

And that's why you have to provide customer actuals to go with the reading.

Customer whats?

There's no way I'm letting npower anywhere NEAR my phone line.

And a 128 bit Amstrad games console. Don't forget the important things!