With all the talk of massive energy bills I found myself in the strange position this week of complaining to my energy supplier that they are not charging me enough for electricity, which is not something I thought I would be doing.

What happened is that I got round to actually reading the bills that OVO Energy have been sending me and found that it was the second least accurate bill I have ever had.

As an aside, the least accurate bill I have ever had was back in the late 80s or early 90s. I lived in an upstairs maisonette and the electricity meter was outside, in the same cabinet as the downstairs maisonette. At some point a meter reader had put the reading for the downstairs meter against my account and when my quarterly bill was generated it ran to 4 figures. That would be a bit steep even now, but thirty years ago it was a stupid amount. Actually the sheer unfeasibility of it was probably what stopped me have a heart attack on the spot, because it was so obviously a cock-up and therefore not something I would have to find the money for.

Anyway, back to 2022, where I had the opposite problem. My power all came from SSE, which got taken over by OVO Energy a while back. Earlier this year the account must have been migrated to their billing system because all the bills looked different. I just threw them in a desk drawer and only really read them this week when the drawer got full and needed sorting out. The first thing I noticed was that I am in huge credit, which made me feel happy. The I looked at the detail and saw that each month the electricity part of the bill only had standing charges on it, with no usage.

On the OVO website I can see the smart meter readings, and can see that they are going up every day, but somehow that is not plugged into the billing side. It was tempting to just turn a blind eye and hope they never notice, but I’m pretty certain that it will eventually show up and probably better to sort it out now before the backlog piles up too much.

Still. It must have surprised the person on the other end of the web chat thing to have somebody say “I want to complain about my bill. It isn’t high enough.”