Gethin switches his gas off but the bills keep coming
Baffled Gethin Chamberlain thinks he has a phantom gas meter installed at his house.
Even when the gas is switched off – and also during spells of warm weather – massive bills keep popping through his letterbox.
“I’ve been getting some pretty eye-watering gas bills for ages,” said Gethin, from Selkirk, in the Borders.
“A couple of years ago I even had someone round to check for a leak because the recorded usage was so high but the engineer couldn’t find any gas escaping.
“The house is B-rated for energy efficiency, so I figured that this is what gas must now cost.”
Then at the start of last month the gas switched itself off. Gethin went to look at the meter and it had shut down.
Again concerned there might be a leak, he reported it as an emergency and an engineer agreed the meter was faulty.
Many emails and time-consuming phone calls to Ovo Energy about getting a new meter followed but Gethin felt he was getting nowhere.
Just over a week ago, Gethin
was whacked with a £400 gas bill for April and May – higher than the rate during the peak of winter with three feet of snow outside.
“I’d been on holiday for two weeks in April and the central heating was no longer on.
“It was like I had a magic meter.”
Gethin believes other people with a Landis + Gyr Libra 310 meter like his could be facing similar problems.
“According to the engineer who came out, there is a known problem with this particular meter registering the wrong readings,” he said.
“What is not solved is just how much extra I’ve handed over to Ovo Energy for gas I have not used.”
Raw Deal contacted Ovo Energy on his behalf and an investigation is now under way.
“We do have systems in place that identify high spikes of usage and pause billing until it has been manually reviewed by an agent,” said a spokesperson for the company.
“Mr Chamberlain’s usage was not high enough to meet this threshold.
“We have now booked in a meter accuracy test free of charge.
“We need to confirm if the gas meter is faulty.
“Providing the meter has been clocking too fast or deemed faulty we will re-bill.”