I moved into a new property (owned) in December. It had pre-payment meters for gas and electricity with a key and card for top up. I had smart meters installed on May 3 and on May 15 received an email from SSE/OVO advising my final bill had arrived and could I log in and pay it. I have not received a bill and have never used emergency credit on either meter. After two hours of phone calls speaking to six different people, a two day chat and thirty minutes on hold today I am no further! They advise I owe £60.27p however no one on any call or message system could confirm how or why I allegedly owe this amount, or whether it is for gas, electricity or a combination of the two. I have not received a bill and no one has been able to send me another copy of it. I was hoping to transfer to being a direct debit customer but I’m not sure about this as you don’t seem to be able to get finance correct when I pay in advance!
Any other pre-payment customers receive random emails about bills that don’t appear to exist?!
Best answer by Emmanuelle_OVO
Updated on 25/08/25 by Abby_OVO
Hey @Mandymonkey,
While you pay upfront for most of your energy with a Pay As You Go meter, it’s still possible to have an outstanding balance. This could be for a few reasons:
Debt repayment from Pay Monthly - If you switched to a Pay As You Go account with an outstanding balance on your Pay Monthly account, the debt would have moved over too. We'll work with you to set up an affordable repayment plan and you'll pay the debt back on your Pay As You Go meter.
Additional support credit - If you've been in touch to ask for financial support, we might have applied additional support credit to your Pay As You Go meter. We’d have also set up an affordable repayment plan with you and that is what you could be repaying through your meter.
Emergency credit use - You might have used the emergency credit in your meter to avoid losing power. This is then paid back from your next top-up. If that’s the case, try to top up enough to pay back the emergency credit, and still have credit left for your energy use.
Standing charge - You pay a daily standing charge. If you’ve missed one because there wasn’t enough credit on your meter, it’ll be repaid from your next top up.
How to get in contact about my OVO Pay As You Go account
The best way to get in touch with us is via webchat here. We’re here to help from 8am to 8pm Monday to Thursday, Friday 8am to 6pm & on Saturdays and Sundays, from 9am to 5pm.
Or get in touch with the team via Phone on 0330 175 9669. Line opening hours are Monday to Friday, from 8am to 8pm and on Saturdays & Sundays, from 9am to 5pm.
There may be some helpful advice in our topic hub:
If you’re on Pay On-Demand, the bill payment is taken from your account balance automatically if there’s enough in there. Otherwise, you’ll be asked to pay the rest - the bill itself will tell you what you need to pay in. However, in this case, it sounds like the bill was auto-paid from the account credit.
If you’re Pay As You Go, you don’t get bills - you literally pay as you use energy which automatically settles the bill on your behalf.
If you’re on Direct Debit, the system figures it out for you provided you keep making your monthly payments.
Does this help @Emma English? I’m not sure from the information provided that you are pay as you go?
Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of zero wealth but much pain.
At risk of being scrubbed, I'm just telling my story.
I moved into a home with BOOST PAYG supplying both gas and electricity.
I didn’t have any problems until the infamous phantom billing letters. Please use the forum search, or even check the popular Boost/OVO Failing Customers group on Facebook to learn more about that — I can’t link it without risking a ban.
Ofgem has some extremely interesting and relevant pages about OVO’s past fines and related issues concerning this scandal. I believe it even made the papers. I was approached for a statement — I declined.
My bill was £1,346 on a PAYG meter three months after moving in. It wasn’t the previous tenant’s debt. This has now been resolved — it took eight months. I paid nothing toward the bill. If any of you have fallen victim to this scam, I’m sure someone from OVO could advise on compensation claims.
It was an error on their side. It is impossible to accrue a debt on PAYG. You can be moved to PAYG because of a debt, but it's illegal to charge someone for another person's debt.
I managed to get onto a Direct Debit monthly electric account. Somehow, my gas account was left on PAYG.
Some of you may be aware of the Apollo to Orion system switch failures. From what I’ve learned from Blastoise on this forum, OVO were forced to migrate to Orion, knowing full well there would be many problems and compatibility issues — but they had no choice, as Apollo deteriorated so quickly.
Again, I implore you to look at Ofgem’s pages regarding the fines OVO received. I believe they’ve been fined multiple times since 2008 for lack of access and overcharging.
For two years, I haven’t had any access to my Direct Debit account. No one can help. “You must wait” is the familiar advice I receive.
I currently have “an agent” on it… I hope to post some results soon.
I believe I’ve been overcharged on my gas PAYG at 10p per unit instead of the 6.08p shown on my annual statement from 2024 — and the current rate (as of 01-07-2025) is 5.86p per unit.
This will also be looked into by OVO’s team. However, I have great difficulty reaching the right department due to my confusing account records caused by the Apollo/Orion transition.
Why am I posting all this?
One erroneous letter began all of this. I’ve been dealing with OVO on and off for three years. For two years, I’ve been on Direct Debit with no access to my accounts. I haven’t even received my annual statement for gas or electricity this year — which I believe was due in June.
One human error caused my accounts to be stuck. Both of my accounts should have been on DD.
Please be vigilant and relentless in the management of your accounts. Both of my accounts
*edited by moderator*
Most customers will be completely satisfied with OVO, they should be. Unfortunately any small issue becomes a massive one for a long time, especially if you are on PAYG.
No risk of scrubbing here as we only remove content that violates our community guidelines and house rules. I’ve linked them below for anyone that hasn’t seen them.
I’m sorry you’ve had a rough experience during the migrations as they’re never an easy thing to accomplish without some pain on both ends. I’ll try and address each of the points you’ve made to try and give some context but as we don’t have account access here some of this may be an overall context rather being specific to you and your circumstances so please bear with me.
If you've recently moved into a property with an existing debt on the meter, our Support Team should have requested a copy of your tenancy agreement. This document confirms your property ownership date, and a new account will be created with a balance reflecting usage from that date to the present. We apologise if this process caused you any inconvenience or delay. For information on how to make a formal complaint or discuss compensation for your experience, please refer to our complaints process.
“It was an error on their side. It is impossible to accrue a debt on PAYG.” -
It’s possible to accrue debt on a PAYG meter. We have an emergency credit process to assist customers who are struggling and require additional credit until they can make their next payment. Repayment options are discussed and agreed upon by the customer and our agents to ensure that the customer does not face further difficulties. More information is available on ourPayment Support page.
We've taken the issues regarding your online account access offline. I've forwarded this to our technical team to investigate the cause of the blockage. We hope to resolve this for you as soon as possible.
To transfer both of your accounts to Pay Monthly, please contact our Support Team. They will be able to assist you with this request. Unfortunately, as I am in a public-facing role, I do not have direct account access. However, I will do my best to help in any way I can. You are welcome to share the link to this thread with the agent you speak with, and they can reach out to me directly if they have any questions or concerns about completing this task. I’ve left the contact options in the link below:
I’ve addressed most of the points in your post. If you feel I missed anything, please let me know, and I’d be happy to revisit and offer further insight.
Let me know if you have any follow up questions. Again i’m sorry for the experience you’ve had and I know that we can do better to ensure this doesn’t happen again!
Hello, I hope you ca help. I recently updated the details on my parents energy account to just my mothers. We were given a new account number and then a few hours later I recieved an email with a bill of £638.25. My parents are on a pre payment meter so I do not understand why we have received a bill. When I contacted OVO they asked me to press button A and B on my meters. The gas meter just showed our balance and the electric meter does not have a button A and B just a blue button. Would anyone know why we would have recieved this bill despite being on a pre payment meter, they are asking for copies of our receipts but we always throw them away and they claim that they cannot see that we have topped up, though our meters are showing the balance
There’s a couple of reasons a bill may have been produced here, but without access to accounts it can be tricky to tell why this might have occurred.
If you’ve not already been in touch with the Support Team about this I’d definitely recommend getting in touch with the team so they can take a look and verify this bill for you. They’ll be able to explain why this has been produced.
I do wonder when the new account has been set up to? If the new account was set up to a date in the past, then it will think you owe money for top ups that have been recorded on another account. It could be a number of things, so please do get in touch with support so they can check things over here.
No risk of scrubbing here as we only remove content that violates our community guidelines and house rules. I’ve linked them below for anyone that hasn’t seen them.
Yes, but OVO also use “at their discretion” meaning they can just remove what they want. Like links and then screenshots of all the fines OVO have received from OFGEM….
*edited by moderator*
*edit* OR MY ENTIRE POST REGARDING THIS MATTER… why has my conversation been deleted?
So, respectfully, that just isn’t true.
You’ve also already fixed my issues, we had to change the email and that was it. Took 2 years of me waiting, arguing and slandering OVO on these forums to fix lol
It was an error on OVOs side, I had a letter and everything stating that…
Seems odd you would forget, Chris.
Sometimes its best to take the criticism on the chin and learn from it :)
Hi, im hoping someone here can point me in the right direction and help me get help resolving this matter. Ive opened 3 complaints within this time and have still bot heard from OVO.
i was away in hospital for a while and occurred some meter debt in the process. (Pre paid). i was topping up little by little hoping to get it down to 0 but over the snowy period we had this wasn’t very efficient as they was taking 70% of what i put on for debt. i called up and asked if there was any way i can pay the debt in one (over £100) instead of paying in chinks and receiving little credit, they said i can pay into a OVO bank account which was sent to me via my account email. So i then paid in full.
so calling back to confirm this, the line was cut off a few time so i enquired through web chat. by time ive got through to an agent over the phone-call and told my issue, they advised me that this bank account was wrong and shouldn’t have been sent to me. During this i have sent a confirmation of the transaction via webchat. The agent on the webchat said wait 3-5 days for confirmation. And the advisor on the phone call said i would be called within 24hrs. This did not happen so i called back and was told 48hrs.
We are now a week later. i have phoned since and still get the same ‘someone will be in touch’ response.
is there anything i can do to hurry this up? As i can no longer afford to top up the gas. any help is appreciated thanks.
Morning @Kjh2024 and a warm welcome to the OVO Forum.
If you’ve made a card payment then it’ll be sat in credit on your OVO account. The issue is just that, when you pay like this, it can’t be automatically added to your traditional PAYG meters.
This one should be straightforward for the complaints handler to fix. They could either send you the credit back as a cheque, or they could send a message to a PayPoint to clear the debt on the meters. You’d then go to a PayPoint with your key/card to pick up the credit, then put the key/card back into the meter, and this would wipe the debt. They’d then need to manually adjust the balance of your OVO account so that it’s no longer in credit.
If you’ve raised a complaint with OVO, and have received an email back, hang tight, you’ll be contacted soon. Please rest assured - your money will not be lost. Give us a shout if you’ve got any further questions.
Lastly - I’d highly recommend getting smart meters installed, free of charge. You’d then be able to top up via an app, rather than going to the shop, and you’d run no risk of the sort of issues like the current one, that can happen with the older key/card meters. With smart meters, you’d also have the option to switch over to be a pay-monthly customer, so you could pay the bills as they come in, rather than topping up the meter, and risking going off supply.
You can find out more about smart meters below. If you’d like to book an appointment, ask the complaint handler when you hear from them. Cheers!
