I have read up on the change in calculations, but our new direct debit makes no sense.
We have £358 credit. We had a DD of £115. We usually have 65-85 usage per month between April and September, and £135-140 a month when the heating goes on.
With the existing DD of £115, that means we would be at a generously rounded £220 credit come April 2026.
Our DD was now set to £153, which exceeds our actual maximum usage of the last few years. That would bring us to a whopping £420 credit at the end of March.
I tried to change it back to £115, but the system insists we will not have a month’s worth of credit.
Can someone please manually change the direct debit back to the old amount? If not, what are my options other than cancelling the DD entirely and paying bills on demand, even taking a potential tariff increase into account? I would prefer to stay on DD, but not with forced overpayments that build unnecessary credit balances. I know OVO is currently having trouble proving that it’s crisis proof, but bleeding your customers to use them as a piggy bank is not the way to go at it.
New Direct Debit makes no sense
- Plan Zero Hero
… our new direct debit makes no sense.
Perhaps the first thing to do would be to find out why it makes no sense. Once you can see where the numbers come from, you can probably either learn to live with them or look for steps to take to change them.
We have £358 credit.
This means very little. OVO’s live billing system means that the account balance changes daily, so a £358 credit could easily drop to £228 later in the month. The current balance is taken into account by the Direct Debit calculator, though, so a credit is deducted from the future costs to find out what the monthly payment should be.
The size of earlier bills is not particularly relevant, either - there are just too many factors involved. What does count are the estimates of Future Annual Consumption (FAC) and the current tariff prices. If your FACs are very inaccurate, so will the DD calculation be. You can see them on the Plan page (in a browser, not the app). How do yours compare with actual usage?
The Home Page of your OVO online account gives you access to this neat little tool. My balance today is just over £350 but today is only the second day of my billing cycle, so each day this balance will reduce until the 28th December when my next DD is due. I actually choose to keep my balance at a particular level and resist attempts to reduce it as I have a fixed income and like to be able to choose to be warm in winter! Perhaps, playing with this feature may help to explain the Direct Debit that has been calculated for you. If it doesn’t, I suggest you contact OVO. I find that I get my best response by using the Messenger function on OVO’s Facebook page.
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