Thank you

Anyone ever get any reply to letters sent to rivergate 

Hi,

Please note that this comment was left by a forum volunteer rather than an OVO employee.

Letters sent to OVO’s HQ do get read and responded to as long as they’re addressed correctly. However, letters sent by post are the slowest contact option available, so I don’t personally recommend them if you desire a timely response.

The fastest way to get an answer from OVO will almost always be Live Chat via https://help.ovoenergy.com .

Hey @Douglas 7253/,

I have to say, I agree with Blastoise here, it is a rather slow form of communication. The letters do though, get picked up by our admin team. I’d suggest you include all of your data protection details so they can find your account, OVO account number, name, address. The address for mail has changed, but any that were sent to Rivergate will be redirected to the new mail address, so it may cause a delay if it was sent to Rivergate initially. It’s now PO BOX 5280, Worthing, BN11 9RG.

do OVO ever consider a discount on outstanding debt if paid in total

can i apply for a settlement discount

Doubtful I would think but this might be of use .. 

@Fiona Merritt there are a variety of ways of dealing with debt.

As well as looking at the ovo information I suggest also have a chat with Citizens Advice or one of the debt charities. 

For example Debt Relief Orders are useful for some people and these cover utility bllls. It very much depends on your personal circumstances and the implications of the route you take. 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-get-a-debt-relief-order-dro

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/debt-solutions/debt-relief-orders/debt-relief-orders-explained/debt-relief-orders-what-you-need-to-know/

Please can anyone tell me an email address I can contact OVO on. 

Any message I get from them has a no reply comment on it which is very frustrating.

There is no general email address unfortunately. There is a chat facility along with the customer support number

Customer Support  -  tel:03303035063

Webchat  -https://help.ovoenergy.com/#contact_us_container

I was afraid that might be the case.

i wanted to convey several points at my leisure and not be restricted..

Thanks anyway for your response.

There is the ‘hello’ address on the bottom of a bill but any input is filtered so you’re not guaranteed a quick reply - if at all. 
I guess it depends on your queries.

OK thanks for that, I’ll check it out.

We’ve had no electricity since early Sunday morning, OVO contact number doesn’t connect you to anyone on Sundays , and their out of hours team either transfers me to a forever queue or no one calls me back. This is really shocking to me after so long OVO still can’t get a basic service right? Ofgem says “I have to give them 8 weeks to respond” are you seriously telling me I have to put up with no power for 8 months until I have the right to complain? And yes tried flicking all fuses off and back on, smart meter is still on but a constant red light shows, it’s also in such an awkward cupboard location cause we live in an apartment block so I was hoping a smart meter won’t make me have to wedge myself in between to get a reading but that doesn’t even work right, called national grid and they say cause smart meter has power it’s not their issue so back to square one, I did not realise their service is this shocking, I hope bare minimum someone will answer the call tomorrow? What are customers supposed to do on weekends?!

OVO’s Social Media Team operates seven days a week on their Facebook/Twitter accounts and are able to assist with this stuff.

However, if the red light is constantly on and doesn’t budge, the meter is dead and needs to be replaced. Please use https://ovoenergy.com/help to report this. This is NOT caused by it being a Smart Meter - any meter can fail in this way.

thanks @Blastoise186 , you won’t believe that it turned out to be the isolator fuse switch that was somehow flicked off early on a sunday morning i suspect by someone in our building unless it could somehow be tripped on its own at that strange time? So yeah i feel very humbled and stupid! but the thing is, neither the 105 line team nor the ovo out of hours agent told me anything about this, guess who actually came to my help even when it was very late on a sunday night? Octupus energy! my DMs to ovo energy twitter channel as well as emails to the ovo complaints team were still ignored, yet by chance a video i sent to octupus energy luckily pin pointed me to that switch being off, but im a bit baffled by why no one could actually pin point to that until i actually shown it in a video? Surely even if im being stupid, it should be one of the basic parts of checks before anyone would even wanna consider sending an engineer, everyone asked to check my own flats fuse and the smart meter but no one mentioned the isolator fuse connected to the smart meter until I by chance shown it in a video to octupus energy when i was showing them the panel below has come off which looked unsafe. I have never had this happened to me, so again it was surprising no other experts i contacted thought to double check that with me either, maybe its a bit of overall ignorance of people who actually live in apartment blocks…. who knows anyway its solved now, this was a very humbling experience and now we just have to try and be more vigilent cause somebody could have tampered with our “main switches” i guess!

Strictly speaking, those isolator switches are out-of-scope for both Supplier and DNO because neither are responsible for them.

But yeah, at least you’re back on. If you had shown that stuff to me, I’d have probably identified it rapidly. :)

all good 

We love the positivity, @krit2509. Do tell us, what in particular is going well? 

So a while back I switched from OVO because they were absolutely awful, unfortunately that was to SSE so now we’re back here again. 

So my SSE account had just over £1000 in credit balance, it having been the summer they did the switch and deactivated my SSE account so all that data is gone for me, and none of it is in my OVO account yet, though someone on chat said it would show up in Nov. 

So that train wreck is on going but amazingly today they took out the new OVO direct debit and the SSE one, so 2 payments of £275 a pop. Neither payment is showing in my OVO account. 

Has this happened to anyone else? Should I be cancelling the SSE DD or are they going to get upset by that as they are want to do? 

Hi @AndrewA ,

The best thing to do in this case is to use https://ovoenergy.com/feedback . They’ll figure this one out.

I've recently moved in to a rental property that was on an electric PAYG meter, fitted by the previous tenant. I did NOT want this so went through the process of signing up with a new supplier with a standard direct debit. Frustratingly I was told I would need to sign up with OVO 1st as they own the meter and would need to remove it before I can choose a new supplier.

I put up with the payg top up for my 1st full month (September) and most of October before I got round to calling OVO to make an account and book and engineer to remove the meter. 

This was the point things got strange, the day after I signed up with OVO (pre engineer visit) I received an email bill from OVO for £136 for September. Even though I was PAYG and paid cash for electric key top up! 

Engineer day and I've put just £5 on the meter as I suspected it may disappear (it did). Engineer actually fits a smart PAYG meter as that is what ovo told him to do. He gave me a code I could use to top up so didn't need to go to the shop.

The meter goes onto a £15 emergency credit limit instead of my £5 but he tells me 'it's ok, just call ovo and they will now transfer you to direct debit and credit your £5 and take you off payg' 

Meter installed on Monday 23rd Oct with £15 emergency credit. Wednesday 25th I top up £20 which left my bank but didn't go on the meter. 

I call OVO to get my £25 back (£5 day of engineer and £20 topup) and get switched to direct debit account. OVO now tell me I need to pay £136 outstanding bill for September and £80 outstanding bill for October before they'll switch me to direct debit! Absolutely ludicrous!

After hours wasted on the phone to ovo and refusing to pay for a bill that is clearly not mine, which even the complaints department did not have an explanation for, they agreed to put me on a direct debit as my electric was going to go off. I had to get very direct for this to happen explaining I have children and you cannot allow the electricity supply to go off! What was happening was the meter took my £25 and paid it off the apparent outstanding debt and would continue to do so until the debt was clear. 

I filed a complaint on Thursday 26th October and was given a case number. The 2 outstanding bills have been put on hold for 3 months pending investigation and I'm yet to hear anything from OVO. I'm absolutely disgusted with the service from OVO and I'm fully aware it will not be resolved easily. My next step is to contact the ombudsman and seek independent legal advice to take this as far as needed. And just to add to this the online bills appear to be changing daily and October has now increased further!!

My smart gas meter isn’t supplying gas to the house as a result of that, my cooker and heating systems are not working and the house is freezing cold. I’ve called the Ovo contact centre twice and after being placed on hold on both occasions, for remote troubleshooting with their Emergency team, they provided no solution. I’ve got credit available and need help to keep my house warm and cook food as well.

Hi @LukeM and thanks for sharing this experience. Sorry to hear. 

It’s tricky to call out specifics as I don’t know the situation on the ground, but there’s a few guesses I can make which may explain the bill. 

If you move into a property supplied by OVO or anyone else, they will need to know that you have, and the date that you have. In the absence of that we will have an account for an ‘occupier without a name’ or the previous occupier. It’s very possible the house was empty in the weeks or months leading up to your move in. In such a scenario standing charge debt would accrue. This would be for the previous occupier to pay, but again until we know a change of occupier has happened we will send communication of these debts to who we think is the occupier. 

Perhaps I’m wrong about what happened and if so, please accept my apologies. I just thought it might be helpful to understand a typical occurrence for prepayment change in occupiers. This guide might also be helpful. 

In your case as it’s prepayment, we just need to know the date you moved in. That way we can create an account from that date, make sure any standing charges for that period are paid for (there shouldn’t be usage debt to pay off ), and apply standing charge debt from before you got the keys to the previous occupier or whoever was responsible for the property in the interim. That and getting your pay monthly account all set up correctly. Our team will be on hand to help get this resolved or escalated for you. 

Yes, sounds easy to resolve doesn't it! You've clearly never been on the phone to OVO customer services. Unfortunately the call centres are all outside of the UK (bristol line is dead) making it very difficult for both parties to understand and there is clearly a generic response script being used and obvious and excpected feeling that the call centre worker is disconnected from the customers reality. I have been bounced from PAYG customer service to Accounts to Complaints over and over with nobody offering a solution other than to pay the bills and all will be resolved! I'm absolutely fuming about it.