Hi, it's Veronika and today, I have an important message which takes higher priority than my GCSE theory video recording that's my main task for the summer. You can read more about my GCSE (and iGCSE) maths classes here.
But the big news is, we won! After several months of fighting a huge energy company that was willing to take an outrageous amount of our hard-earned money without batting an eye.
Being able to do simple maths can save you loads of money. Hear my story and I'll also show you how you can do that too:
If you want to skip the crazy story and see how to do the calculations, click here to get right to the maths stuff.
We got a final bill of an outrageous amount (around £1100) when we switched from a huge company to a rather smaller one of our own preferred choice. There's also a shameless plug at the bottom of this article (click here to get to it right away) where you can switch too, have an easy way to track bills and more autonomy about your payments, and also get extra £50 for going through my referral link. I did that too and I tell you, the £50 welcome bonus is way nicer than the kick in the rear we were about to get from the huge company we wanted to leave.
I knew right away this amount on that final is absolute nonsense even with the prices being so hiked up since last year. Literally, the final balance was more than what we used to pay for the whole year before the energy crisis. This was all on top of all the huge bills we were paying the whole time and that also accounted already for way more than what we used to pay per year. According to my quick glance at things, we would be at max several hundred pounds in debit which I was ready to pay but I certainly wasn't ready to pay over a thousand pounds.
Long story short, I've immediately worked out (see below how) the actual usage and raised a complaint. There were weeks of going back and forth, occasional calls from us to them telling them why we're getting more final bill reminders that are payment is due, overdue and even that they are sending debt collectors to us(!) while we are in a process of sorting out a complaint and we were told this is being investigated by the said company. Ridiculous, at least, but better to say, absolutely shocking!
Needless to say, it cost us quite a lot of nerves, to deal with people who can't do their job properly which is to do basic maths (and likely they'd just do it through some program anyway), my time as I ended up sitting around a lot of bill statements, creating elaborate spreadsheets to make it easier for the company people to see their mistakes, my partner's time spending every couple of weeks on a phone explaining that we're not paying this amount because we recalculated it and it's clearly wrong (while I'm patient with my students, I can't keep my calm when someone is literally trying to steal my money and not listening to my quite obvious complaints about the fact that their wrong calculations are going to cost us a lot of money).
We said we'll get a solicitor to help us defend our rights, we said we'll dispute it with the manager of a manager (or wherever it will take us), I said I will give them a couple of basic maths lessons as that's clearly what they need, we said so many things to get this through...
I don't know what happened in the end, whether it was simply my endless repeating of what my calculations say versus how theirs are wrong. I don't know if it was my final outrage when they acknowledged my calculations (even thanking me for those and saying they really helped them to adjust the bill) and recalculated a ridiculously small adjustment (about a tenth of what the adjustment really should've been).
But suddenly, later this week, I got an email with an apology and a final bill that reflected a correct adjustment. To be honest, it looks like they added some extra "apology" reductions as well but I'm not going to complain about that. We were already planning to tell them that we will bill the energy company for our time spent doing their job, which is a simple final bill calculation.
Now, when this nightmare is over after I just paid the correct amount (in the middle of summer while we switched energy suppliers already at the beginning of spring, well, nevermind), I wanted to share it with everyone.
Be mindful of your bills, these overcharges are common (this was not our first rodeo but definitely the first one with a ludicrous amount of money). No matter that we had even a smart metre (which actually isn't working right now, sadly, so I have to do the manual metre submission every month...), they got magically completely different metre readings than those I sent them when we moved in and even when we switched. It literally looks like they got their own opening and closing metre readings out of thin air. So a big red flag. But not being able to calculate even with adjusted metre readings, that looks clearly like a scam to me. How many people do these companies overcharge every year and pocket all the extra money while already having enormous profits despite the "energy crisis"? If we got overcharged nearly a thousand (and we had to fight so hard to have that rectified), they can do this to easily to 1000 people and make extra £1,000,000. A million pounds, easily made like that just by counting on the fact that people won't be able to check and correct their bills. In fact, one wouldn't expect they'd need to check their bills, right? Just pay as usual, monthly or quarterly, when you switch or move, pay whatever outstanding debt you might have at the time according to the company's final bill calculation and move on.
Right?
WRONG!
Always check - you only need to know how. And always take notes of your metre readings when you move, switch suppliers, etc. Always when you're starting with a new company and finishing with them as well. Not only notes on paper, take a photo. Without that, I won't be able to back up my claim that they made up their own readings. I even had to not only send photos of it but show them metadata (that's the extra information in the photo file) to show them that it was indeed taken on those days I said it was. The audacity of it! The unspoken implications, that they'd assume I'm making this up (hence "show us the photo is a real deal") - well, let's not even get to that.
How to not get scammed by energy companies on your final bill:
It's simpler than it looks like. Be aware, that prices for standing charges (fixed amount per day) and per unit (of kWh of electricity or a kWh of gas which actually needs to be converted from "units" of gas - that's slightly more complicated, but I'll walk you through it too) tend to change (last year more than any time before since ever I could remember) so ideally you'd do the calculation with each bill to be as accurate as possible.
Let's have an example, this was sent to me earlier in the year as a reminder of how much we spent per unit, per day, per everything (this bill was actually correct at least when it comes to what's written there, although they had wrong opening readings, as I stated above, I'll use it for the example calculations).
Let's look at the electricity:
It says that from 22/4 to 6/6 it's 45 days. That's to be multiplied by the standing charge which I prefer to calculate when already converted in pounds, so 47.282p is £0.47282 (let's be even more accurate than petrol stations with their "tenth of a pence").
So 45 x £0.47282 = £21.2769 -> £21.28 ...these calculations I'll always round to the nearest pence - they do that too although they rounded down (truncated), while I rounded up, mathematically. But one pence is not a problem.
£21.28 for electricity standing charges for that time period.
Moving on...
From the metre readings, it looks like we used 144 kWh which also looks about reasonable (it's good to know how many units of gas and el. you might be using at different times of the year but as long as you have the metre readings - and ideally not just opening and final, but between as well - you can always check the units in more fine detail too).
As the kWh at that time was 26.512p which is £0.26512, let's calculate the electricity usage:
144 x £0.26512 = £38.17728 -> £38.18
That's the calculation for all units of electricity used during that period.
Let's look at the gas:
Strangely enough, our gas was billed for 44 days, unlike the electricity, because, why not... (from 22/4 to 5/6, not 6/6).
That's to be multiplied by the standing charge, which was 25.923p, that is £0.25923
So 44 x £0.25923 = £11.40612 -> £11.41 ...again, they truncated, I rounded mathematically (so up again, in this case too).
£11.41 for gas standing charges for that time period.
Nearly there but here goes a potential trouble with "units of gas" vs "kWh of gas"...
From the metre readings, it looks like we used 1330.73 kWh but also it mentions 118 units at 39.7 calorific value - WHAT IS THAT?
If you ask what that is, as I did when I saw it for the first time: Those are the units you read on your gas metre, because gas metres usually give "units" that had to be recalculated with the following formula to kWh of gas used as the prices are normally given per kWh of gas, not a unit of gas. Also, it's good to understand that the conversion is depending on the calorific value - that's variable due to weather conditions and such (you can see I became quite an expert on these things - but that means you don't have to, you can just use the calculations guide I'm providing here).
Let's check that kWh and units work out well in this statement.
My gas unit to kWh conversion example uses the calorific figure provided in the above statement (39.7) and the unit-to-kWh conversion formula:
( gas units * calorific figure * correction coefficient ) / kWh conversion factor.
( 118 * 39.7 * 1.02264 ) / 3.6 = 1330.738707 -> 1330.74 so that "fits the bill" (pun intended, there's rather very little humour in this article given to the seriousness of the topic...) And again, they apparently truncated, I rounded mathematically, but one hundredth of a kWh won't make a dent in the bill.
Bear in mind, gas units and calorific value would vary according to each statement, the correction coefficient and kWh conversion factor are constants.
As the kWh of gas at that time was 6.986p which is £0.06986, let's calculate the gas usage with the correct amount of kWh:
1330.74 x £0.06986 = £92.9654... -> £92.97 ...yet another little difference in the final rounding, but again, that's really not the problem, that won't make the crazy difference which we were facing to having to pay incorrectly.
That's the calculation for all units of gas used during that period.
Now let's put it all together:
EL. standing charges + EL. usage + GAS standing charges + GAS usage = £21.28 + £38.18 + £11.41 + £92.97 = £163.84
Then add VAT to it. According to the notes, these bills accrue 5% VAT. The easiest is to multiply the raw amount by 1.05 (that will take us to 105% of the original value, hence it'll easily add that 5% in a quick calculation).
£163.84 x 1.05 = £172.032 -> £172.03
Their £171.99 is actually favouring the prices to us (how ironic considering later on they were asking us to overpay close to a thousand), considering their unusual rounding/truncating, but you can see, that adds up to a difference of only 4p. So our calculation check is alright here, all seems to be fine on this bill. This is how you can check each bill.
But it went wrong elsewhere (also our account got moved in their system and the bills were "conveniently" inconsistent for quite a while - allowing them to accrue the wrong units) - again, we got completely wrong metre readings the company "made up" - so I had to be calculating out usage completely from scratch.
The mechanism of it is the same.
Ideally, you get readings for various periods (as the standing charge and price per unit changes), use the calculations for each period according to your metre readings and check if it "fits the bill".
Ours didn't. Ours was off by nearly £900. That's an awful lot of money for a normal couple who needs to work hard to pay their mortgage and other usual "normal human outgoings", an awful lot of money as a result of a "mistake" on behalf of a multimillion-pound company.
So, you need to calculate standing charges x the number of days for each gas and electricity and unit usage per kWh (for gas you might need to convert units first). Then add VAT if not already included in the indicated prices per day and per kWh in your bill.
Now, you might be thinking about changing to a company where this crazy stuff with overcharging is not likely to happen because they have a way better means of giving the customer control over how much they pay, they make everything more transparent and clear with each billing, they have much better customer support - more responsive and more helpful... If that sounds like something you need, you might want to switch to the same company I was waiting to switch to since we moved to our house (only back then, because of the energy crisis, no energy companies were taking new customers). And if you go specifically through this link provided, you'll even get a £50 bonus towards your bill with them. Hooray, what's not to like here!
Switch to Octopus - it helps me have my energy bills more under control.
I hope my guide on how to check your energy bill was helpful and can help many people avoid possible overpayments (please, share this further if you found it useful) - because I'm sure this happens way more often than one would expect.
I'm so happy this is over, the laughingly small final bill, that we finally got this week, is paid, and I can just enjoy my life without the added worry and embarrassment of having debt collectors coming to our doorstep, demanding us to pay bills that we don't owe but because we're just two normal people and they're a multimillion-pound company, they think they can get away with it.
Now I'm going to finally get back to recording the videos for my GCSE (and iGCSE) maths course. I'm so excited about it, much better than dealing with people not being able to do their job, costing us time, and energy, and if we weren't persistent and not being able to do simple maths, then also A LOT of money...
But before I do that, I think this deserves a joke at the end, this is really heavy stuff I was sharing today with you. And as the weight's been just lifted off of our shoulders, a little celebration and some puns are in order:
I found this very befitting one:
With great power comes...
....huge electric bill!
So I add:
With great maths power (actually, simple would do too) comes...
...normal electric bill!
I'm so glad I can do simple maths.
