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Npower summary
Andy Birkenhead
Posts: 13,450 Forum Member
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This may be a daft question, so please forgive me ! 
I pay Npower £54 per forthinght for Gas and Electricity.
This morning I received a summary / statement which read £252.05 Credit.
What does this mean, exactly ?
Is it a good thing or a bad thing ?
I pay Npower £54 per forthinght for Gas and Electricity.
This morning I received a summary / statement which read £252.05 Credit.
What does this mean, exactly ?
Is it a good thing or a bad thing ?
0
Comments
Get on the phone, tell them you want the £252 overpayment repaid and the fortnightly(?) figure reduced to something more sensible.
Though it might be sensible for him to be in credit before the winter kicks in? Depends what his consumption actually is.
No I don't think so - I've always kept my payments up to date
Handy for the winter when your consumption is higher.
Npower, Eon and others will happily estimate your readings all day long leading you into the assumption that you are in credit and then hit you with a bill later on with your actual readings.
Much better to have an account that is on-line and will accept readings that you enter, that way you are in better control of your bills.
I use Scottish Power and enter my readings every month (although that's part of the agreement) and can see my average daily use
Phone them and ask. With winter coming it might be better to be in credit so you will not be hit with a bill for unexpected high usage.
Hmm maybe you're right.
I think I'd better leave it, but I'm thinking of all that money just sitting there !!
However, as others have said, don't ask for the money back. Your energy consumption will be much higher over the coming months. If you request a refund, you will still be paying the same for a couple of months but come march/april you're payments will go UP to pay for the energy you used during the winter. Always best to be in credit I say
Also, you seem to be paying around £117 a month which I think is quite high. How many people are in your household? What kind of property do you live in?
There is just me and the wife.
We live in a 2 bedroomed terraced house.
Everything in the house is electric except the gas fire (which we only have on in an emergency !
That seems like a lot. We don't have gas at all, but for 2 people in a 3 bedroom house we are currently paying around £40-45 per month for electric (I submit monthly meter readings for an accurate bill) and the most this has been in winter is about £65 per month.
I'm with the other posters that say leave yourself in credit over the winter, but come March I'd be looking into my bill vs my consumption and asking for the difference back.
I don't pay by direct debit.
I have a plastic card.
Npower have told me to pay £54 per fortnight, which I do at the post office.
What they do is look at your usage from the past 12 months; so this is summer and winter combined. Assuming your consumption will remain roughly the same they average your yearly figure out into 11 or 12 equal instalments (sometimes less depending on certain things).
Because you use a lot more energy during winter your consumption is higher. Normally, without being on a payment scheme, you'd have high winter bills and lower summer ones (especially for gas).
So, what you are paying is an average monthly amount so you don't have to struggle with £500 bills in winter and then £30 bills in summer, for example.
It seems they think you use around £1,296 over an entire year. £900 of that could come from the 6 cold months and the other £396 from the warmer months. So, without being on a payment scheme, you might see bills for the two cold quarters for about £450 each and in the warmer quarters around £198 (these are just easy calculations... I don't know exactly what you use
In fact, check on the statements. It'll show you how much you have used. Bare in mind this statement is (probably) for July, August and September when it was warmer and lighter.
I always went the extra mile for the customers I personally dealt with and did my best to get them the best deal (the type of advisor in a call centre you would want to speak to really).
Until one day, I got a lady calling up shouting and bawling that we were ripping her off, wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways, she was being personal and rude towards myself and all I was trying to do was help her and explain what was going on with her account, but she knew better than me (so she thought), she was being extremely difficult and wouldn't help me to help her.
At the time I was suffering from Depression and was trying my best to not let it get in the way of my work and I kept asking for support from my team manager and he didn't want to know!
As we had been told in training, if a customer got personal with you and not at the company as a whole, we were allowed to warn them and terminate the call (which I did).
She called back and totally changed the story and got npower to believe her and she played the frail old lady card and I got sacked!
When they were investigating the call, npower sent out to me in the post, a copy of all these customer's personal details as part of the investigation pack (which is a breach of the Data Protection Act).
So watch out what npower ARE doing with your accounts and if you are a customer who constantly shouts and bawls at advisors in call centres, give them a break, they have nothing at all to gain by not helping you as that is really what they are there for. :-)