Gas bill always worng?

[A.Lee]

I changed my gas supplier in September. They worked out their direct debit amount from average usage.

This monthly amount was clearly too much.

So I asked them to look into it, numerous times. It took them until this week to agree with my old supplier what the meter reading was etc. , and have subsequently reduced the DD monthly amount. Now, on viewing the bill, they are charging me in Cubic Meters, when my meter is in cubic feet.

So, I am getting a 2.83 times more gas than I am paying for.

Being as their customer service is so rubbish, I am not taking the time to inform them of this. I did ring my old supplier to query their bill this week, and they know I am on a Cu ft meter, so the problem is the communication between the 2 suppliers, and they have made a mistake somewhere.

Now, will they ever notice?

(of course, I'll keep a stash ready to pay them if they do ever realise their mistake)

[charles]

They are charging you in Cu metres because that is the normal way of charging. You oviously have an old meter.

No. A cu metre is 35.3 cu feet.

[Bob Martin]

Yep, and a metre is 3.28 feet.

[Brian Gaff]

Now, I can understand cubic metres for a liquid like water, but how do they do this with a gas, surely gas is compressable so how do they judge what a metre of gas is exactly?

Brian

[Robin]

2.83 is the factor used to convert between "units" of 100 cubic feet and cubic metres.

When we switched to British Gas last year I noticed the statement said the units were converted to kilowatt hours using a formula which wrongly labels the units as metric when they are imperial, and then omits the factor (2.83) needed to convert from one to the other. But the result (in terms of kWh) was correct. I pointed out that this made it hard for people trying to check their bill but of course they did nothing. Alan may wish to check to see if his bill is the same - ie wrong formula but right final amount.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It's a cubic metre at a standard pressure. The temperature makes a difference and varies through the year, but that is taken into account in the conversion from cubic metres to kWH.

Ultimately, you are charged in kWH, but gas meters can't measure that directly.

[Mark]

Energy companies must deliberately make their bills hard to read in order to make it difficult to prove they are overcharging you ;-)

[Alan]

In message , A.Lee wrote

I've just got my email reminder from BG to provide a gas meter reading as they are just about to generate a bill. I have done so and it has corrected the "estimated" usage.

Result: in the last 1 day I have used 0.3 MILLION kWh !!

The BG billing system cannot cope with negative number. My actual meter reading is a 4 units less than their estimate.

[Terry Casey]

This is presumably what BG calls "volume correction".

My metre reads in "metric units" according to BG - but they don't say what that metric unit is!

Conversion process is shown as:

nnn Metric units used × 39.3 calorific value × 1.0226400 volume correction ÷ 3.6 to convert to kWh = xxxx gas used in kWh

[Chris Hogg]

See

whether domestic gas suppliers conform is anyone's guess.

[David WE Roberts]

Am I having a dumb moment here (as usual)? If they are charging you for a cubic metre of gas every time you use a cubic foot of gas then surely you will get an enormously inflated bill? {QUACK} In simple terms, if they charged you for a cubic yard every time you used a cubic foot that would be 27 times the cost. i.e. you would have to use 27 cubic feet of gas to use 1 cubic yard.

Other way round works fine for me, though :-)

[soup]

[js.b1]

The more common mistake is the other way around. They overcharge people by miss-reading the meter units.

Undercharging recovery:

- Limited to 12 months by OFGEM if a consumer

- Statute Of Limitations (6 years) if a business

I believe the meter must be read at least every 6 months and no doubt checked re units, it would be fiscally negligent of the corporate accountants not to ensure this is performed. The same accounts who require everything be mini-packed for periodic inventory instead of weighing each screw or bolt "bin" at beginning & end of period.

However I do not believe they can charge you interest for the missing amount, unless criminal activity could be actually proven such as fiddling the meter (old ?blue? gas meters used to be reversible and were commonly reversed to understate a gas bill).

So simply stick the money in a 3% account such as Post Office or ING :-)

Energy companies spend half their time trying to jack up monthly payments and I really wish they would do something about the ridiculous price increases if you do not switch from a scheme. I think one a year or two ago was 89% increase in electricity if you did not switch.

The biggest mistake was to privatise the electricity & gas companies. They should have restricted the privatisation to maintenance, grid servicing and so on, but for National Economic Competitiveness set reasonable gas & electricity prices. That would have created more nukes and less electricity-generation gas burning (burning out the North Sea). We could have become globally attractive to heavy industry including metals production, rather than like Germany doing everything possible to move it elsewhere.

[Andrew Gabriel]

No, that's a correction for the gas being at higher pressure than atmospheric (22.64mBar, apparently).

I suspect it's done in the calorific value.

[Roger Mills]

If you think that, try understanding your BT bill when you've got

• quarterly billing

• free evening and weekend calls on a 12 month rolling contract which doesn't align with any of the quarters

• Line Rental Saver (paying 12 months in advance) covering a 12 month period which doesn't align either with any of the quarters or with the free E&W year . . . all running concurrently.

Most gas bills are a doddle in comparison with that!

[Roger Mills]

You're overlooking the fact that a reading of 1 on a meter reading in cubic feet is *not* 1 cubic foot - but is *actually* 100 cubic feet.

I'd rather be charged for 1 cubic metre rather than 100 cubic feet - wouldn't you?

[Roger Mills]

No! Volume correction here (about 2%) must be something to do with correcting the volume to what it would be at a standard temperature.

I have an imperial meter, and there's an extra step in the calculation, viz:

nnn Gas units used x 2.82 Imperial meter (converts to M^3) x 39.3 Calorific value x 1.022640 Volume correction ÷ 3.6 = xxxx Gas used in kWh

[Mark]

Telecos do it too

[Robin]

We had a new energy statement today which has corrected the error so I retract my comment that BG did nothing.

[Andy Wade]

No it's both. The CV is at some standard temp & pressure and the volume correction factor corrects, notionally, for the actual T & P supplied. For domestic consumers the VCF is always 1.02264 - it's a deemed average value, prescribed in legislation [1]. Large gas users get calculated time-variable VCFs.

[1] Some statutory instrument that I did look up once, but can't remember the number of. I'll dig out the details if anyone's interested.