I didn't have meter readings for electricity or gas from 12th May. I complained and the gas readings restarted, but still no on-line (edit: electricity) meter readings. And I still don't understand how to check the bills. Looks as though I have to find a way to download via a REST API, with guidance from SpeakEV members. I can do that, but why should I have to?

 

"3. They sent me an April to June bill for electricity but with no actual readings for standard or cheap rate, just an overall consumption figure"

I think the GO and Agile bills are calculated using the half hourly readings now, rather than the total meter reading..Happy to be corrected. The meter readings should be returning to the bills soon apparently, as people expect to see them there..

 

.................

 

Same story for me on Go but now on Agile.
I've not had an electricity bill since December.
Lots of billing issues before that which led to them crediting a full month.

They then recently billed me for the credited month which they have now credited again after another call from me

I raised a complaint a few weeks ago but still haven't received a bill.
I'll chase today and may ask them to escalate the complaint to the next stage.

You could try going through the complaints process on this page if you haven't given up entirely.

Bulb always seem to get good reviews but not sure how competitive their pricing is.

 

Not been with them long and have noticed their website isn't the best when it comes to looking at consumption.
For example on my gas meter I can look back at readings all the way till last week... :/

I could look at literally years with British Gas.
Leccy meter not working at all (not Octopus, was faulty when I switched)

Not on an agile or go tariff yet, due to the meter issues, but not boding brilliantly.

 

I am currently with SSE (who have recently been bought out by OVO) on their "1 year Fix And Drive" Tariff - you get 2000 free units of electricity for charging your car between midnight and 5am - its divided up through the year so 500 free units per quarterly bill. you have to have a smart meter with half hour reading - I was already an SSE customer so easy to switch and my smart meter was compatible, so this was the attraction to me.

Started in November 2019 - first bill Feb 2020 - all the readings on the bill were correct and reliable the only problem was that there was no 500 unit rebate. So I raised a complaint, they gave me a load of guff about it being a new tariff and the computer was not configured properly. After a couple of weeks they issued a new bill which included a rebate of the equivalent of 500 units £83.45 and said that all had been fixed and going forward future bills would have the rebate automatically calculated.

Guess what? next quarterly bill comes in in May, no rebate, and because of COVID19 is making them short staffed, they are only accepting queries and complaint from vulnerable customers only, even so I have tried to contact them online but it just keeps rejecting me "sorry something went wrong"

Seems generally that these EV Tariff's are just hassle, they want your business and they want to nudge you into the habit of timer charging through the night when demand is at its lowest, but don't want you to benefit from cheap electricity, they make it awkward as possible.

The truth is, even at full rate the cost of electricity for my EV, is a quarter of what I was spending on diesel a month so I don't think I can be arsed with all this crap to be honest.

The trouble is I was born in Yorkshire and have a duty to save money.

 

I found that bills from Octopus were patchy while I was on Go tariff; chasing was required and I get the feeling they were being compiled with manual assistance behind the scenes. I switched to Agile just before the lockdown started, and billing has been spot-on for my first two bills; half-hourly data in PDF for each day included. I couldn't be happier, especially as my costs have gone down with switch from Go to Agile; working from home and driving fewer miles fits the Agile profile well for me.

 

Likewise ^

My billing on Agile is regular now, for both export and consumption.

I did have a few issues with Go. They had 2 registers on my meter and were billing for the opposite one, (cheap 20 hrs, normal 4hrs)..

Worth remembering as of now both are still Beta tariffs and you agree to this on sign up.

 

I’m on Octopus Agile for electric and Octopus Tracker V1 for gas. Always had bills on time and great customer service when I’ve had a question.

 

I'm actually here at my desk as I need to send (another) follow up email as my data is not getting through for Agile. I've also got Tracker but as I don't use any gas between March and October not too worried about that. Nor have I had a bill for my electricity yet since my SMETS meter was installed in January.

I'm not too worried, large unexpected bills aren't an issue as my PV panels are doing most of the work at the moment but they obviously have meter and billing issues, and as an ex-SSE employee a long time ago know how time consuming problems can be..

 

I've asked a couple of times and have been told that they have to do the billing by hand. I wonder if there's a third party involved in this?

 

Been with them since Feb and not had an electricity bill either. Started on Go, then switched to Agile 3 weeks later when I could see I would save far more.
Have escalated numerous times but not got anywhere as yet, other than having my gas readings sorted...

Keep at them, from what I understand any anomolies are manually billed, so it can take time to 'get it right'. After-all they are still saying this is a 'beta' service and not without it's snags. I am patient enough, given the access I have to the data to calculate pricing myself to hopefully avoid any nasty surprises.

 

Been with them since Feb and not had an electricity bill either. Started on Go, then switched to Agile 3 weeks later when I could see I would save far more.
Have escalated numerous times but not got anywhere as yet, other than having my gas readings sorted...

Keep at them, from what I understand any anomolies are manually billed, so it can take time to 'get it right'. After-all they are still saying this is a 'beta' service and not without it's snags. I am patient enough, given the access I have to the data to calculate pricing myself to hopefully avoid any nasty surprises.

Did you email smart@octopus.energy? Assuming you can see some usage in your account, they tend to get the missing data filled in quickly..

 

If any half hourly data is missing/not received (from DCC for SMETS2, other for SMETS1/Secure branded meters), I believe they currently have to manually retrieve the data, but they're working on the automation of this.

Octopus are the only supplier billing using HH data (for Agile and GO) for billing I believe, so as it's all still relatively new it's still in Beta..The billing platform itself is by all accounts quite good. Eon, Good Energy and Origin (Australia) have all have paid to licence it.

 

Many people seem to complain about Octopus Go or Agile about billing and other data issues, but the reality is this is a BETA service and the problems are the smart metering network/systems that Octopus have no control over.
They are the ONLY company doing half hourly billing and if just one bit of data is missing they cannot produce a bill. Cutting edge products do have problems and Octopus are working hard to resolve as timely as they can.
I am only on Elecy with them. Switched back in March and all looked good from a data viewpoint, but had multiple dropouts of data over 3 months. I know I had halved my costs, but it’s always good to have a bill to confirm. Chased via support and smart metering emails, but also used Octopus forum (James) and got data holes filled by Octopus requesting the data all the way back to my smart meter and then I got a bill also. Of course another data hole is visible now, so not expecting 100% for the rest of the year, but happy to recommend Octopus (as an engineer understand the technical issues) and they are very responsive and the best value.

 

God help us if banks treated our data with such incompetence. How hard is it to multiply some figures together and the do some adding up. I've seen equally bad arithmetic from other suppliers and it sometimes looks like they are trying their hardest to make the simple look complicated so customers are are unable to spot billing errors. I have had to get tough with them a couple of times and take them to court. They always pay up then.

 

God help us if banks treated our data with such incompetence. How hard is it to multiply some figures together and then do some adding up. I've seen equally bad arithmetic from other suppliers and it sometimes looks like they are trying their hardest to make the simple look complicated so customers are are unable to spot billing errors. I have had to get tough with them a couple of times and take them to court. They always pay up then.

Lol 😂 Clearly you don’t understand the process.

Go and Agile require half hourly billing consumption data provided by a smart meter.
That is 48 pieces of data for every day.
Double that if you have gas too.
Billing is normally every month, so there needs to be a minimum of 48*30=1440 for elecy only, 2880 if elecy and gas
You also need the complete set of half hourly rates (less of an issue as will be known) but still another 1440 or 2880 bits of data.
Providing you have all of this data, you can create one monthly bill.
If only one bit of smart meter data is missing you cannot create a bill.
Octopus have no control over the DCC network systems.
Smart meters are designed to store a minimum of 12 months worth of data, so there is a big buffer in time to get things sorted.

Every other supplier has it dead easy, start and end consumption reading, multiplied by tariff Rate and daily charge.
No smart meter required.
4 bits of Data.
Easy peasy, a five year old can do that.

 

The annoying thing is that the role out of SMART meters started in 2011, with all homes due to have them installed by about (if I remember correctly) 2018. The install date then slipped to 2020 for all homes. It took some time for anyone to realise that the spec for the meters didn't allow for customers to switch suppliers. So the SMART 2 spec came out. It was always supposed to cope with 1/2 hourly metering. It was then found out that all the SMART meters had the same encryption key for the return channel. The DCC was set up in about 2016 to sort out the communications mess, including providing a link to all the SMART 1 meters already installed for all the utilities to use - that was due to be completed by now. Billions have been spent and there's been a huge amount of false advertising claiming that SMART meters save energy. People save energy by switching things off. Most people seem to have ignored any information from their meters (people on here probably being exceptions).

I'm not blaming Octopus, but the government and the industry as a whole. The project is a mismanaged fiasco. To start giving it leeway for it being a BETA project, 8 years after it started and was already supposed to be completed, totally misses the point. How is our governing system ever held to account?

 

Billions have been spent and there's been a huge amount of false advertising claiming that SMART meters save energy. People save energy by switching things off. Most people seem to have ignored any information from their meters (people on here probably being exceptions).

As I said above, I'm not too bothered about bills and I keep an eye on the basic readings, so currently import about 2.5kWh a day but I'm one of the ones who watches the monitor when it's working and switches things on accordingly. At least I can sometimes get an idea of the available PV surplus by seeing how much I'm diverting to hot water (+ experience). But some people seem to be clueless: there is a constituency of people who go to the MSE forum who are surprised by their bills and others like us who help them. Half hour data is a bit different, but you really only need subtraction, addition and multiplication skills to understand a normal bill.

 

I've not had a bill since October of last year on Go. I have a massive credit showing but also the knowledge that I haven't been using more than I have been spending on it (been keeping an eye on meter usage) I recently moved to Agile and know that they have been receiving the reads, they now need to sort my billing out. I was going to wait until they had sorted out the billing, but as someone told me, if you move to Agile, they are going to have to sort it out sooner

 

I agreed to switch to Octopus 2 weeks ago. They gave me an estimate of costs using their tariffs against Bulb my current supplier and they were £30 per month cheaper. They had all my usage data from the last year with Bulb.

So I looked a little more closely at their tariffs & daily rate. All are more expensive. Night rate E7 was 22% more expensive than Bulb.

I also need an installation of a SMETS2 meter. I could live with the short term extra cost on 12m.

They could not give me any clue on an installation date and even say 6-9 months into the future: COVID related which is an issue. They are not installing yet. I know they are others on this site have shown they are.

I cancelled the switch, Bulb have me on an install list and I'll maybe look again at Agile when I get a SMETS2 meter.

 

I agreed to switch to Octopus 2 weeks ago. They gave me an estimate of costs using their tariffs against Bulb my current supplier and they were £30 per month cheaper. They had all my usage data from the last year with Bulb.

So I looked a little more closely at their tariffs & daily rate. All are more expensive. Night rate E7 was 22% more expensive than Bulb.

I also need an installation of a SMETS2 meter. I could live with the short term extra cost on 12m.

They could not give me any clue on an installation date and even say 6-9 months into the future: COVID related which is an issue. They are not installing yet. I know they are others on this site have shown they are.

I cancelled the switch, Bulb have me on an install list and I'll maybe look again at Agile when I get a SMETS2 meter.

Octopus Energy

The UK's most awarded energy supplier. We're doing energy better - for you and the environment.

octopus.energy

 

Computers dont make up numbers. Modern ones easily cope with half hourly data. If electricity suppliers are incapable of capturing the data and then using it to calculate a bill, they are in the wrong business.

 

The billing process is bonkers

not a clue what it all means

but it’s cheaper than my last company



the app is no good but the website is much better

JJ

 

Had my first GO tariff bill today - somewhat messed up! I think they have charged me precisely double what they should have looking at meter readings, data from the Tesla and Solaredge apps and the bill they supplied. The graph showing usage is right-ish, but they seem to have confused power with energy and charged me as if each half-hour reading interval was an hour, IYSWIM

According to this bill, my meter reading would be about 500kWh higher than it actually is. I do find it a bit odd they don't put the meter readings on the bill as they did with the previous fixed tariff I was on. Still, I guess if they did, it would really confuse their software!

It seems this is a common issue, so I'll be keeping a close eye on my bills from now one. It's not a big deal (yet) but it could get messy if left alone.

Hopefully they will get to the email I sent earlier and get it sorted...eventually.

I must admit, I didn't do any homework before signing up for this tariff, what a plonker I am! Still, it is cheaper, assuming they sort the billing anyway. One thing struck me though, if one wasn't on the ball, it would be possible to pay too much and not realise.

 

The Go tariff is a beta product - so expect some problems. With anything like this I would always email smart @ octopus.energey (without the spaces), and it should be resolved quickly.

John.

 

@Anaglypta

Thanks for that link John, I'll mosey on over and see if they'll let me in!

 

I've not received my Christmas Day rebate yet. I emailed them a few days ago: still waiting for a reply.

 

Not getting too far with this so far..

No reply to the mail I sent Saturday so I've tried re-sending it to the 'smart' version of the address in case they are better equipped to deal with it.

Tried the link to the Octopus Forum but it only offers me a login dialogue with no option to contact any members for an invite, although it does mention I might need one. Had a mooch round the parent site but can't find anything helpful.

Guess I'll just wait for someone to get back to me in the fullness of time...

 

Hi @ChrisS99 I've sent you a DM

John.

 

I think there's a (dcc) problem with certain smets1 meters that have been migrated to dcc? Leading to double kWh been reported.

 

@phroxy do you know this for sure? Have you got a reference link. DCC are typically impossible to get in touch with for members of the public but Octopus should be able to. They have a trigger channel so if there is some public information on this I might be able to raise a response on that.