I give meter readings each month, why is my bill still based on estimates?

Thanks to you all for your help, I had to phone OVO as my account still hadn’t updated, nice surprise I owed £200 less than the amount billed. 

Hi @Colin Wheeler 

If your billing period ends on 22nd and you don't have a SMETS smart meter then enter a reading for 23rd. I know you don't or didn't at least have a SMETS smart meter.

This will mimic what a SMETS smart meter does where the usage on the 22nd is given to OVO via the SMETS smart meter network on the morning of the 23rd.

Going back to the 21st is the wrong direction.

This has worked for everyone who has raised the feature in the past on the forum as far as I am aware.

I don't think it is anything to do with your setup. You are not alone in reporting the feature, it is a fairly  common question that ovo are well aware of. Access to your account isn't needed.

See if that helps.

I can search and find some examples for you if you like, else have a search yourself and see if you can find any.

Did you get anywhere enquiring about ovo or in fact any supplier reading your AMR meter on a domestic tariff or alternative options for your setup? Hopefully one day you will have a setup that doesn't require manual readings on a regular basis.

Hope you get your bill sorted, good luck!

Feel free to post any follow up queries, one of the regular posters can often help with quite a few questions.

If you want to "get your message across" without raising a complaint then this is worth a try. This isn’t a complaint email address as I know you don't want to raise a complaint. It is just a feedback email.

"Or, if you’d just like to share feedback – good or bad – of a recent experience you’ve had with OVO, you can email Raman’s team. Please include your OVO account number, address, and a summary of your experience."

You can even include a link to this thread in any email to Raman if you like 

https://forum.ovoenergy.com/my-account-140/online-accounts-computer-parameters-17107

hi Jeffus,

So as I take readings daily and now go to my account online and enter the figure for the 23rd you are saying the bill shown for the last payment period outstanding at present will update to a correct reading and not have the estimated element. Well I can certainly try this however the previous quarter we enterred the dat on the 21st and 22nd and the bill did not have any estimates added?? so is it still not a computer software problem?

As to your other question My remotely reading Meter doesnt require manual reading, I do so myself for my own purposes. Suppliers, (Others) can remotely read these Meters, OVO just choose not to do so!  

Afternoon All,

Not sure if this is any help to other AMR meter users, But after a very lengthy call to various departments this morning in South Africa, we appear to have made some progress in understanding the issues we were having over input of our import meter readings. 

It was nothing to do with timing of input of readings but as we suspected an issue with the computer software and it’s programming! It wouldn’t matter whether we were inputting our data on the day after period end it would still generate the same result.

Thanks to Jeffus for Info though.

Apparently The readings we were inputting were considered outside of the parameters set as “reasonable” in the accounts software so the online account flags up a box saying this is high “are you sure” but when you confirm, it does not add the reading to the account it instead automatically generates an internal query for this to be checked, and puts an estimation on the bill shown. 

I have been told this is done in house and is not a department that is “Customer facing”.

I would question how this can be investigated if the customer is not involved??  The simplest answer to this to aid the investigation would be an e mail or message to the customer as to why the reading was high? not just sit on it internally. 

We are high winter users and very low summer consumers of Electricity but it seems OVO  system cannot cope with this.

I am of course looking at other suppliers etc. to see how we would fare if we swap and am informed that Octopus among others, can indeed read AMR meters and can also, with customer input build a Half Hour profile with a years worth of Data to get an accurate profile.

Of course there will allways be the compromise of not accessing all the bells and whistles offers that come with so called “smart Meters”nor the problems that also come with them. sticking with the AMR meter that has and is serving my purposes  as I am not really interested in flu flam offers.  

All I really want, and I suspect others do to, is a supply at a reasonable cost and a fair payment for the green energy I provide, If OVO can’t do this then so be it! 

I would like to know other Customers experiences with AMR meters and their interaction with OVO and others so that I can make informed decisions.

If Any one is having similar problems persistance is the key the answers are out there!

CW

Same Old, Same Old,

I Know members cannot access others accounts, however here we are at then of another billing period for us, 22nd. We enterred the figures for 21st (last day of previous moth and 22nd day we were told to add new reading and hey presto online account still shows estimated bills, (and a severe under estimae at that.) As our online account is now showing an under estimation based on last months under estimation it now shows us as severely in debt to OVO. this is the kind of issue that got the post office owners into trouble. Fortunately we monitor our own usage dsily so hsve been able to make accurate and documented payments. So if it comes to the crunch we will have evidence.

The fixes suggested in the postings on this subject do not work on our account so are not the fix suggested. When we add our meter readings to the account the computer software does not seem able to accept them (they are high at this time of year due electric boiler) so does not add them to the account but adds its own estimate. This has now happend to every bill since we were forced to join OVO (migrated from SSE). 

It will never be sorted as OVO have a don’t care, dont listen Policy it seems! 

Hi firedog,

Thats why I posted as we have been having this issue for more than 4 months, We have been entering our readings on the first day of the new billing period as suggested here by yourself and others. We have also tried on several occasions to get the support staff in South Africa to help, after lengthy phonecalls and several levels of staff they have been unable to enter the readings eithe, Nor has the Bot, In all cases we have ended up with an estimated amount showing on our account, and a sverely under estimation at that.

The problem is a software one, in that limits of usage have been set in the software such that if they are exceeded by a manual entry the system “dithers” and places an estimate to the limits programmed. The support staff are unable to override it and there is no access to the programmers to get the system amended.

We are a high winter user sometimes over 100kWh per day so when we add our monthly figure it throws a spanner in the works. We have not been with OVO long enough for the system to “learn”, if it is even capable of doing this! We were a migrated customer from SSE and that process went on for over a year so we can’t believe we are the only customer in this position.

repeated attempts to get the issue resolved it is still on going. 

If the managers of this Forum are worth their salt they would be flagging the issues back to the  “non customer Facing” areas of the company so that some of the other issues I see raised here were dealt with as well as ours!

I am sorry but my statement still stands thet OVO just aren’t interested, and will remain until they prove to me otherwise.

Thanks for your interest  though!   

Hi Emmanuelle,

You would have to ask your billing/accounts/computer people why the account balance doesnt update properly. We are tearing our hair out trying to get OVO to deal with us properly.

As I said in my last post, The problem appears to be that as a  3 phase high use customer in the winter (sometimes over 150kWh a day) the Computer system doesn’t accept our readings and puts an estimate in instead and a very low one at that. 

We spent over an hour on the phone to south Africa speaking to 4 different levels of customer service personel last month and none of them could update the readings, they said they would start an investigation and get back to us, that never happened.

We then tried to use the auto system and that resulted in the account being updated with another low estimate and not the figure we gave.

We have just received our bill for the current period and it is a complete work of Fiction, an estimate based on an estimate. There is Also a worrying factor in that, Firstly, the Bill shows the figure we enterred on the auto system on the 27th as being the one we put in on the 21st of last month (the end date of our last period) and not the one we actually gave on 27th.(The estimated opening read on the 22nd is 462 Kwh lower than the one we enterred on the 21st??) Secondly this latest bill is also calculated on Decembers prices not the ones we were informed were to be charged from 1st of January. 

As for the issue of a Smart Meter, No Thanks, we don’t need any more Hassle. 

It’s not just our Import that is affected Our Export has been a shambles from the start with OVO and is still an ongoing problem.

We are a NET exporter of solar Power having 193 panels connected to the grid via a 3 Phase ½ hour remote reading (Mobile Phone network) Meter. This meter is remotely readable for both Import and Export but OVO refuse to do so.  

WE can’t trust OVO to get our bills right and havent been able to since being migrated from SSE, so we are doing our own calculations based on actual figures and paying what we know we owe. The whole sorry saga is a shambles and no one in OVO wants to engage with us to sort it out. 

Apologies for unloading this here but there just isn’t any other way of getting the message back to OVO., I don’t know if you as a Moderator/Manager, have any methods of drawing attention to these issues but as it appears OVO use the forum as a method of informing their customers then perhaps it should be used for feedback as well! 

Thanks for your interest.

C

Good Morning,

Thankyou however this begs the question “How long does it take for the Billing team to adjust the system” as this has been going on for more than 4 months.

rgds C.