Two years ago, my husband and I moved from a three-bedroom house to a two-bedroom apartment. Since we moved, our energy bills have almost quadrupled.
Our supplier, Octopus, charges us almost £430 a month for electricity.
In our old house we paid around £90 a month for gas and electricity (the new property has no gas).
When I asked about this I was told nothing could be done unless I had a smart meter installed. Octopus said this would make our invoices more accurate, so I agreed.
I had to wait six months until an engineer told me that it was not possible to connect the meters. I have now had three separate meters installed, but none of them have worked correctly.
Not so smart: None of the smart meters MD has installed have worked, which means you’re still struggling to figure out why your bills are showing high usage.
I have continued to make monthly payments of £120, the level our direct debit was set at when we first moved into the flat.
As it stands, we have a debt of £1,859 in our account.
This is stressful for us and is affecting our health. MD, Northumberland
Helen Crane from This is Money responds: As with many people who downsize, you and your husband are retirees and moved to a smaller home to reduce your living costs, but it turned out to be just the opposite.
You told me that your bills have never been right since you moved into the apartment, but no one seemed able to identify the problem.
The story is similar to this couple, who discovered that the cost of making a cup of tea shot up from £1p to £5, in this case after they had a smart meter installed.
You agreed to a smart meter. They installed a new meter, not once, but three times.
You even checked how much the neighbors in your apartment block paid for energy and discovered that it was much less than you. But nothing seemed to get his bills back to normal.
You have made formal complaints to Octopus several times. Your last complaint was closed in July 2024, even though you told them the issue had not been fixed. He was told he would receive a call next week, but it never came.
Octopus reversed some of the charges on his account in April 2024 because of the problems he had, but in October his direct debit increased again to £430 a month – much more than he thinks he is using.
He sent another complaint to Octopus customer service and the CEO’s email address in October, but said it was not acknowledged.
I contacted Octopus to ask what was going on.
He reviewed his account and carried out remote “technical checks” on his meters, but said he couldn’t see any problems with them.
You have an Economy 10 setting on your meter, which involves a total of three readings on two meters.
Record your daytime and nighttime energy consumption separately, because they are charged at different rates.
This is a common cause of confusion on energy bills, but after their investigation, Octopus said that in their case it had not caused any problems and that the energy usage they had billed them for was still correct.
Instead, you think there is a device in your house that uses a lot more energy than you realize.
You have no idea what this could be, since most of your appliances came from your previous house, where the bills were fine.
“In cases like this, where someone feels their energy usage is incorrect, but we don’t see any problems with the meter, we usually perform a ‘creep test’ on the meter to identify if any appliance is using more energy than expected,” a spokesperson said.
‘We should have tried to do this before changing the meter in 2023, and the fact that a new meter still gave high readings means there is likely something in the house using more energy than MD expects. “We are very pleased to be able to help her investigate this further.”
But Octopus also said it had not handled her complaints as well as it would have liked and, in light of this, wrote off her outstanding balance of £1,859.
He recommended having an electrician examine your heating system to make sure there were no underlying problems that could have caused the very high loads.
When I told you about this, you didn’t believe it. He had decided that he no longer wanted to be an Octopus customer and decided to switch to another provider, EDF.
You had not been able to do this previously because your account was in debt.
He has since changed and says his invoices seem much more accurate so far.
He also believes he has solved the mystery of why his bills got out of control.
When he joined EDF, he checked his meter readings because they seemed too low.
You sent a photo of your meters to EDF and it explained how the three different readings work, and that one should refer to daytime energy use, another to night time and the third should be the total.
After reviewing your Octopus bills, you believe you were adding the daytime reading to the total reading, rather than adding the daytime reading to the nighttime reading, which would explain the much higher charges.
I posed this to Octopus, but he didn’t answer that specific question.
It has also lodged a complaint with the Energy Ombudsman, meaning it will be investigated again.
Whatever the outcome, I hope your energy bill worries are over and you can enjoy your retirement in peace.
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