My 3 bedroom house was empty for 29 days in October 2023 as there was a change of tenant. The house is 3 bedroom semi detached. My estate agent supplied details to OVO for meter readings.
Electricity use for the period was approximately £50
Gas use for the period wasapprox £12,800 - that is a bill of around £480/day
OVO were alerted to this by my estate agent in December.
Since then i have spoken on phone and on chat with customer care, sent emails in, sent complaint emails in and had no response.
I have had one debt agency contact me and when i spoke to them about the debt they said “we are sending this back to OVO, its clearly a massive mistake, that bill is ridiculous.’
My estate agent said after speaking with OVO that they would stop with the debt collection and investigate. Then yesterday, 26th March, i was contacted by ANOTHER debt agency chasing me for a £13,000 unpaid bill - for 29 days of gas and electricity.
Why am i getting absolutely nowhere speaking with OVO on the phone and via email? I am being harassed by debt collectors for a bill that is clearly a screw up - and no-one at OVO seems to want to do anything about it.
I am now looking at Ombudsmen complaint and arranging legal representation because no-one will tell me who i should speak to. Clearly the £13,000 bill needs erasing and an estimated bill put its in place for the period (29 days).
Can anyone help point me in the right direction?
Best answer by Abby_OVO
Updated on 23/06 by Ben_OVO:
If you have a sudden large bill, this is likely due to an out of line meter reading, the first thing to do would be to check the meter reading history via your online account or app. If you’re still living in the property please contact the support team with an up to date meter reading. It’s always a good idea to send in a clear picture of the front of the meter, displaying the reading and meter serial number.
Out of line meter readings could be submitted incorrectly by an out-going, in-going tenant or owner or letting agency. But can usually be corrected quite easily by the billing team.
Sorry to hear about the trouble you’ve been having.
Looks like Blastoise186 has left some helpful advice in contacting the Support Team, the team are available to you today if you’ve got time, but you can always take care of things tomorrow.
You can contact the team now via social media, send us a message on Facebook or X from 7.30am - 8pm monday to thursday, 7.30am - 6pm fridays and 8am - 5pm saturday and sunday.
Hello @Andrew Burton, it may be that you need to alert OP Michael to your interest in his case by using the tag (if that’s the correct term?) @MHarley which might drop an alert into his email inbox, as it may well be a few months since he’s visited this thread. It would be interesting to know if everything is sorted, and how it panned out in the end. Hopefully though, by now it’s job done…
@MHarley would/should receive a system generated email to say his thread has been re-activated. But I notice his post is marked 'sorted', which probably explains why he hasn't posted again.
Possible account issue. @Account1 please show us your meter reading history from MyOVO.
The reason I ask this is that if you’ve not submitted an actual reading in forever - which I think might be the case here - then this can happen. Estimated Readings have basically a 100% chance of being wrong and the longer you ignore this by not submitting actual readings, the worse it gets.
Either way, you definitely want to make sure you submit an actual reading and contact OVO immediately via https://ovoenergy.com/help . Rebuilding your account might take a while, but OVO can put measures in place to prevent further account corruption in the meantime - however you’ve gotta flag this up with Support for that to happen.
If you don’t already have one, I’d strongly recommend you (and anyone reading this!) to consider a Smart Meter and set it to Daily or Half-Hourly Readings. The more readings OVO gets, the faster this stuff can be fixed. Please see https://smart-booking.ovoenergy.com if you’re up for getting one. If you already have one and it’s not working, https://smart-meter-help.ovoenergy.com should get you back on the road.
If yours is working, you can crank up the reading schedule via MyOVO or in the app.
Have said all along when working for SSE and then SSE/OVO that if a bill is produced way out the normal it should be stopped and looked into before getting sent to the customer
Dealt with loads of inaccurate billing and have been out to customers that are in distress or terrified by them
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government😕
Thankyou for the replies yes I nearly had a heart attack but got another billion for £8.99 (we are no longer with ovo since March 2024) so I choose to believe that one!
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government😕
I've actually been to customers in the middle of winter where they have panicked and switched everything off fue to high inaccurate bills…
Sitting with layers on and their outdoor coats trying to keep warm…
Saw the coldness in your breath inside the house
Immediately turned everything on for them
Looked at the Meter and the reading on the bill and it was mokes out
I’m sorry for the issues you’re having. That’s a stressful communication to recieve.
My advice would be to reach out to the support team. It may be a typo or it could be due to an out of line meter reading. The topics below might be helpful to you:
Thankyou for your replies: I have received a second email pertaining to a period we were with ovo in spring 2024 with the following: a bill for £8.99
No idea why they're sending me this stuff now, clearly some kind of glitch, but I'll take it over the previous one!
@Account1 If I were to hazard a guess, it’s probably a bill correction. Perhaps someone was looking into it in the background? Either way, if you pay that off (and I suspect you probably already have) then it’ll disappear forever and you shouldn’t see it surface again.
Skeck wrote:
What's your normal billing usually ?
Have said all along when working for SSE and then SSE/OVO that if a bill is produced way out the normal it should be stopped and looked into before getting sent to the customer
Dealt with loads of inaccurate billing and have been out to customers that are in distress or terrified by them
Skeck wrote:
Pandora6 wrote:
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government😕
I've actually been to customers in the middle of winter where they have panicked and switched everything off fue to high inaccurate bills…
Sitting with layers on and their outdoor coats trying to keep warm…
Saw the coldness in your breath inside the house
Immediately turned everything on for them
Looked at the Meter and the reading on the bill and it was mokes out
On the phone and hot it sorted
Horrible feeling seeing them like that
@Skeck The old SSE billing system was abysmal from what I understand and it corrupted tons of accounts. OVO had no choice but to dedicate entire teams to spend tons of time fixing that and doing data cleansing as part of the migration to OVO. While they did the best they could and did manually fix well over 10,000+ accounts, there’s always a chance that some will slip the net. It’s precisely why OVO decided to scratch build Orion because the legacy Apollo billing system also proved to be trash. At least a scratch build means you can fix it yourself if it breaks!
Not sending a bill at all also kinda breaks the rules in an even worse way so it’s a rock and a hard place situation. But I am tempted to fling this backstage to chat more with the other volunteers...
I will be back shortly, just catching up with other threads at the moment and talking to someone about unrelated stuff. Sorry to be a pain, but please bear with me while I get some other things taken care of!
And only after I posted this do I realise that I messed up the comment. So I’m gonna add this little extra to clarify something. I’m absolutely NOT saying it’s acceptable to scare the living daylights out of customers - in my view it’s completely unacceptable to do so and one supplier (not OVO) has already felt my wrath in recent months as a result of their staff doing so.
I stand firm that I frown upon suppliers who deliberately engage in some of the behaviours that this thread mentioned. If that means being critical of OVO, then I will do so too - my Forum Volunteer role here doesn’t prevent me from speaking up if I feel I need to. But I kinda also prefer more to talk about solutions over ranting which is one of the reasons I don’t post much criticism publicly - it’s not really my style per se.
But at the same time, the supplier still has to send something to avoid other issues cropping up. I need some time to think this through before I reply again - purely because this is a crazy complicated topic and I don’t want to mess up my comments!
My 3 bedroom house was empty for 29 days in October 2023 as there was a change of tenant. The house is 3 bedroom semi detached. My estate agent supplied details to OVO for meter readings.
Electricity use for the period was approximately £50
Gas use for the period wasapprox £12,800 - that is a bill of around £480/day
OVO were alerted to this by my estate agent in December.
Since then i have spoken on phone and on chat with customer care, sent emails in, sent complaint emails in and had no response.
I have had one debt agency contact me and when i spoke to them about the debt they said “we are sending this back to OVO, its clearly a massive mistake, that bill is ridiculous.’
My estate agent said after speaking with OVO that they would stop with the debt collection and investigate. Then yesterday, 26th March, i was contacted by ANOTHER debt agency chasing me for a £13,000 unpaid bill - for 29 days of gas and electricity.
Why am i getting absolutely nowhere speaking with OVO on the phone and via email? I am being harassed by debt collectors for a bill that is clearly a screw up - and no-one at OVO seems to want to do anything about it.
I am now looking at Ombudsmen complaint and arranging legal representation because no-one will tell me who i should speak to. Clearly the £13,000 bill needs erasing and an estimated bill put its in place for the period (29 days).
Can anyone help point me in the right direction?
Page 2 / 2
Hello @Andrew Burton, it may be that you need to alert OP Michael to your interest in his case by using the tag (if that’s the correct term?) @MHarley which might drop an alert into his email inbox, as it may well be a few months since he’s visited this thread. It would be interesting to know if everything is sorted, and how it panned out in the end. Hopefully though, by now it’s job done…
@MHarley would/should receive a system generated email to say his thread has been re-activated. But I notice his post is marked 'sorted', which probably explains why he hasn't posted again.
What is this nonsense?
Ha ha and I thought my bill was bad!!
Possible account issue. @Account1 please show us your meter reading history from MyOVO.
The reason I ask this is that if you’ve not submitted an actual reading in forever - which I think might be the case here - then this can happen. Estimated Readings have basically a 100% chance of being wrong and the longer you ignore this by not submitting actual readings, the worse it gets.
Either way, you definitely want to make sure you submit an actual reading and contact OVO immediately via https://ovoenergy.com/help . Rebuilding your account might take a while, but OVO can put measures in place to prevent further account corruption in the meantime - however you’ve gotta flag this up with Support for that to happen.
If you don’t already have one, I’d strongly recommend you (and anyone reading this!) to consider a Smart Meter and set it to Daily or Half-Hourly Readings. The more readings OVO gets, the faster this stuff can be fixed. Please see https://smart-booking.ovoenergy.com if you’re up for getting one. If you already have one and it’s not working, https://smart-meter-help.ovoenergy.com should get you back on the road.
If yours is working, you can crank up the reading schedule via MyOVO or in the app.
What's your normal billing usually ?
Have said all along when working for SSE and then SSE/OVO that if a bill is produced way out the normal it should be stopped and looked into before getting sent to the customer
Dealt with loads of inaccurate billing and have been out to customers that are in distress or terrified by them
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government
Thankyou for the replies yes I nearly had a heart attack but got another billion for £8.99 (we are no longer with ovo since March 2024) so I choose to believe that one!
No idea why this figure was sent to us.
Pandora6 wrote:
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government
I've actually been to customers in the middle of winter where they have panicked and switched everything off fue to high inaccurate bills…
Sitting with layers on and their outdoor coats trying to keep warm…
Saw the coldness in your breath inside the house
Immediately turned everything on for them
Looked at the Meter and the reading on the bill and it was mokes out
I’m sorry for the issues you’re having. That’s a stressful communication to recieve.
My advice would be to reach out to the support team. It may be a typo or it could be due to an out of line meter reading. The topics below might be helpful to you:
Thankyou for your replies: I have received a second email pertaining to a period we were with ovo in spring 2024 with the following: a bill for £8.99
No idea why they're sending me this stuff now, clearly some kind of glitch, but I'll take it over the previous one!
Pathetic! I am so glad I am leaving OVO!
@Account1 Personal Information was detected in your comments. A takedown has been requested.
Ah OK yes take it down. I'm not sure how to do so my end the edit button is no longer available.
Thread cleaned. Please allow some time for the CDN to totally purge those images - they’re usually completely obliterated within 24 hours max.
Account1 wrote:
Thankyou for your replies: I have received a second email pertaining to a period we were with ovo in spring 2024 with the following: a bill for £8.99
No idea why they're sending me this stuff now, clearly some kind of glitch, but I'll take it over the previous one!
@Account1 If I were to hazard a guess, it’s probably a bill correction. Perhaps someone was looking into it in the background? Either way, if you pay that off (and I suspect you probably already have) then it’ll disappear forever and you shouldn’t see it surface again.
Skeck wrote:
What's your normal billing usually ?
Have said all along when working for SSE and then SSE/OVO that if a bill is produced way out the normal it should be stopped and looked into before getting sent to the customer
Dealt with loads of inaccurate billing and have been out to customers that are in distress or terrified by them
Skeck wrote:
Pandora6 wrote:
@Skeck exactly the stress must be terrible especially if this is an older person or even a pensioner who has already had their winter fuel payment stopped by the government
I've actually been to customers in the middle of winter where they have panicked and switched everything off fue to high inaccurate bills…
Sitting with layers on and their outdoor coats trying to keep warm…
Saw the coldness in your breath inside the house
Immediately turned everything on for them
Looked at the Meter and the reading on the bill and it was mokes out
On the phone and hot it sorted
Horrible feeling seeing them like that
@Skeck The old SSE billing system was abysmal from what I understand and it corrupted tons of accounts. OVO had no choice but to dedicate entire teams to spend tons of time fixing that and doing data cleansing as part of the migration to OVO. While they did the best they could and did manually fix well over 10,000+ accounts, there’s always a chance that some will slip the net. It’s precisely why OVO decided to scratch build Orion because the legacy Apollo billing system also proved to be trash. At least a scratch build means you can fix it yourself if it breaks!
Thanks for the help folks.
It's upsetting to think errors like these can terrify vulnerable people into turning their heating off, that should be a scandal.
It’s… Complicated… Very complicated...
Not sending a bill at all also kinda breaks the rules in an even worse way so it’s a rock and a hard place situation. But I am tempted to fling this backstage to chat more with the other volunteers...
I will be back shortly, just catching up with other threads at the moment and talking to someone about unrelated stuff. Sorry to be a pain, but please bear with me while I get some other things taken care of!
And only after I posted this do I realise that I messed up the comment. So I’m gonna add this little extra to clarify something. I’m absolutely NOT saying it’s acceptable to scare the living daylights out of customers - in my view it’s completely unacceptable to do so and one supplier (not OVO) has already felt my wrath in recent months as a result of their staff doing so.
I stand firm that I frown upon suppliers who deliberately engage in some of the behaviours that this thread mentioned. If that means being critical of OVO, then I will do so too - my Forum Volunteer role here doesn’t prevent me from speaking up if I feel I need to. But I kinda also prefer more to talk about solutions over ranting which is one of the reasons I don’t post much criticism publicly - it’s not really my style per se.
But at the same time, the supplier still has to send something to avoid other issues cropping up. I need some time to think this through before I reply again - purely because this is a crazy complicated topic and I don’t want to mess up my comments!
