Huge bill following change of smart meter?

Had you not noticed that your old meter had not been sending readings? You should have seen this as your bills for gas would have been estimated every month. On your present bill, does the meter number on the bill match the meter number on your actual physical meter? When your meter was replaced a sticker should have been placed on it showing the closing reading of the previous meter and the starting reading on the new meter (see picture attached). This is the sticker on my meter that was replaced, as you can see, on 25.09.23.

No the meter was taken out and no sticker was put on the one that was installed,as for the meter not sending readings,it was quite a long time before i was notified by ovo,the guy from field force who replaced it was not very proffesional and was in a hurry to get to another job.i did not know they had to put a sticker on with the old reading.when i spoke to ovo today and raised the question about the old meter reading i was told they have not recieved a reading from the old meter,so im at a loss as what to do.

The problem you have here is that OVO will have to try to trace where your old meter is and then attempt to get readings from it. Although we had a sticker put on our meter with all of the information that you can see, the guy who did the installation also took his own photographs of the old meter before he removed it (he also took photographs on our cameras too!). He then recorded that final reading from the old meter and told us that would be passed onto OVO. This is what our first bill after the meter change looked like. As you can see the details recorded and sent to OVO were used to work out our charges. 

You have another problem as, if the meter was not a new one, it probably did not start from zero when it was installed. 

My only advice to you is that you raise a complaint regarding your present bill. Put as much detail as you can about how the meter change was done and how you do not have a sticker on the meter or any record of the either the closing read on the old meter or the opening read on the new meter. Since your bills prior to the meter change will all have been calculated using estimated readings as you say that the old meter stopped sending readings, it is unlikely that you have been charged correctly for the energy you have used. You may have been overcharged or undercharged. Quite how OVO will attempt to resolve this, I do not know, but they have 56 days to do so before you can escalate your complaint to the Energy Ombudsman.

Going forward, I would suggest that you regularly log into you account and check that readings are being sent. (I do so every day as I record my usage as I am a data nerd!). On the account you will see a box that tells you when your meter last sent its readings. This is what my box said yesterday (28.02.26). If readings are not up to date, I do not let this go for longer than a day before I send my own readings. 

I think it rather depends on how long it was between the last actual reading and the meter exchange. Rather than trying to extract readings from a faulty meter, I think the normal approach is to monitor readings from the new meter for a suitable period, then use the average consumption figures to estimate usage during the blank period. The estimate could well be too high, in which case there will have to be some negotiation until a figure acceptable to both parties is reached. If it looks too low, keep shtum 😉

This would work well in the case of electricity for someone who, like me, has both electricity and gas. My electricity usage varies very little across the year. So I could, easily, come to an agreement about average usage. My gas usage last year (2025) varied from 1127 kWh in January to 109 kWh in September. That pattern of usage is common for me for the last few years. I guess OVO could use that data to try to estimate my gas usage for a particular period. As you say, though, any figure that might be estimated will depend on how long the meter has not been working and the readings that were sent when it was working. 

It is, however, one of the things that I find most frustrating about OVO and smart meters. They appear to allow them to fail for too long before they contact customers. Someone with a smart meter should never receive an estimated bill, so that should be the trigger for contacting customers - the first estimated bill! Although there are, of course, data nerds like me who check their usage daily, it should not be assumed by OVO that everyone does this. The longest time that I have allowed either of my meters to fail to send readings is 3 days, after which I contact OVO and send my own readings, including photographs to back them up. Allowing customers who assume, as all the advertising still tells us, that smart meters can be relied upon, to go for months without accurate readings is not a great business model, in my opinion!!!

Hey ​@Reaper72 

Sorry to hear about this, though I’m glad to see a couple of our community members have already stopped by with some helpful advice here.

Without further detail on the timescale this occurred over, it can be very tricky to tell through the Forum what’s caused such a jump in the bill. One of our users mentioned the readings may well have been estimated for a while due to the lack of smart readings from the old meter, this could mean we were underestimating the gas usage during that time, and when the new one was fitted, an average was taken. This is usually the most common reason for this type of increase, but as mentioned, we don’t have access to accounts here at the Forum to dive into account records. 

I would suggest reaching out to the Support Team for some help clearing up why this may have occurred. We’ve got a couple of other topics on the Forum which might be helpful here:

Do let us know how you get on.