Building up large credit amount due to charge anytime credit not being included into direct debit

Hey ​@paulandrewjones 

I’m sorry to hear of the issues you’re having,

I’ll raise this internally & see if I can get any helpful advice. The following topics may have some helpful advice:
 

If you need assistance in the meatime:
 

How to get in contact with the Charge Anytime team

• Charge Anytime - 0330 175 9678 (Option 1 new customers/option 2 existing customers) or chargeanytime@ovo.com

The direct debit calculator does not adjust for refunds/credits such as Charge Anytime or Power Move credits.

The DD calculator uses your recorded usage from meter readings, plus or minus any current Debit or Credit that you have on your balance.

Whilst including the current Debit/Credit is meant to balance things out it isn’t hard to see that in practice it doesn’t always do that.
Mainly because your CA credit is increasing your account credit each month but only being adjusted for  every 3.

The calculator also accounts for fixed rate ‘Bolt-Ons’ such as Greener Energy, etc.

However it can’t easily account for variable bolt-ons such as CA or PM.
Those would need another calculation to be done each month and the result fed into the DD calculator as another factor.

For the PM credits it’s not that great a problem, but the credits from CA can be much larger and can easily skew the recommended DD.

OVO don’t/haven’t seem interested in refining the DD calculator to take these variable credit amounts into account -if they can.
At least not yet, but maybe with more shouting from affected customers?

Yes its awkward as there seems to be no solution. We reached an absolutely crazy £750 in credit which is 5 month energy usage, got max refund amount of £330 and reduced the payment to the minimum allowed £155. The next month it just automatically put it back up to £172 again….

This is an annoying feature of the current automated DD calculation; potential, possibly predictable credits to an energy account can’t be included. For example, some customers will receive a regular annual boost every winter in the form of the Warm Home Discount, possibly leaving their accounts with an unnecessarily large credit balance. The adjustment that can be made online is limited - reduce the DD by 10% for a period. 

Making the DD more reasonable will involve contacting Support: first, to request a refund of the excess beyond a month’s expected costs, and then to adjust the DD if necessary. The online refund request wizard won’t allow you to reduce the balance below three months’ DD, but support agents can.

Note that when electing to pay by DD, you agree to keep the account in credit ...

Hi - I have EV charge anytime and Heat Pump Plus. My projected electricity costs used to calculate my Direct Debit don’t seem to take account of either of these upgrades. Does anyone else have this problem?

Hi ​@bmedey ,

This is currently considered intended behaviour due to how those work. It’s not considered a bug, but you can always just leave any extra credit in your account or dump it out every so often should you wish.

Thanks - so you think the projection systematicaly overstates the electricity cost? Ovo do estimate the amount of energy used to charge my car / heat my house - so I'm not sure why they can't build these into the projections. It doesn't seem right to overcharge and then expect the customer to have to request refunds.

It’s more because those add-ons initially charge in full upfront and then issues a pro-rata credit afterwards. It’s not overcharging because you ultimately pay the correct rate. This is just how Type of Use stuff has to work.

I disagree - OVO estimates how much of my usage is on heating my house and how much is on charging my car. It's relatively simple to build this into the projection, which would lead to a more realistic view on how much electricity will cost. If there's a desire to encourage these technologies (which is why discounts are given), why penalise by overcharging for these and then expect the customer to claim it back.