Why have I failed to receive my latest FIT payments from SSE - Have I been switched to OVO?

This chap Tim is away at the moment, but back soon I think.

Finally free.

Had enough of messing with OVO/SSE and transferred my FITS payments to EDF. I started the process on 27th Sept but it took until 14th Dec to complete.

EDF asked by email for my first payment reading on 1st Feb and today (  just 5 days later ) they have sent a PDF of the payment I will get in 6 working days. Assuming the money arrives then I’ll be a very happy bunny.

In comparison - OVO have *only just* raised the paperwork for an outstanding payment period from July 18th to me leaving them on 14th Dec. They also tell me I won’t get this money for 4 weeks.

Best of luck to all those still suffering - I hope you get what you are owed soon ( especially those suffering with cash flow issues in the current economy and the charities OVO/SSE are messing about ).

EDF do not get what you are owed from OVO for you.

EDF only pay out from the starting reading you give them on the first day of your transfer to them.

Use that same date and reading for your LAST input to OVO  ( send the OVO FIT team that same reading on that same date ).

I did finally get my owed money from OVO ( mentioned in my post above ) in just under 4 weeks from the date of the email they sent to me with my final FIT payment calculation they owed me.

Possibly the act of transfer triggers the final calculation from OVO and that is why I finally got what they owed from them.

Hey @Brown4454,

Sorry for the issues you’re having,

Are you referring to data protection when you contact our Support Team? Unfortunately we would need to ask your details when you contact us to ensure your account is kept safe. 

You can contact our FiT Team by calling 0330 303 5063 and selecting ‘4’ when the IVR instructs you to do so, they will be able to chase up your delayed payments. 

Hope this gets sorted for you as soon as possible. 

If you don’t mind me asking, how easy was it to switch your FiT account?

Like many, I’ve been through the ups and downs with SSE “customer service” since fitting PV in 2014.  for the past year or so they’ve actually been pretty good, paying within a couple of weeks of giving the reading.  They did foul up badly with their “COVID excuse” non-payment fiasco - could have asked for the photo of the meter a year earlier and avoided a lot of wasted “customer service” time.

OVO are also a shambles it seems.  I only discovered this morning that I’d been forcibly transferred to them from SSE (with no communication from either company they were doing this).  I only found this our this morning by accident.  I rang SSE to ask why my March payment hadn’t arrived and to check they had got both the March and June FiT readings I’d submitted online.  An extremely rude Scots woman told me that my query had nothing to do with SSE (“as I was English”!).

Spent ages on the phone to two call centres and ages on hold.  Eventually discovered my FiT agreement has switched to OVO with a massive new delay with payments.  Not happy about it at all.  I’ve been told that I won’t now get either the March or June payments until September at the earliest.

In one way I’ve clearly dodged a bullet though.  We were about to switch our energy supply to OVO, as they seem the best for us at the moment.   Having now experienced what is clearly an almighty mess, then I will only switch to OVO for energy if they agree that I can pay for energy many weeks in arrears and randomly withhold payment whenever I feel like it, without any penalty.

If switching my FiT contract to another provider is both straightforward and results in payments being made on time then that looks like the best way forward.  I can then just mark OVO as being a company to never ever do business with in future and move on.

All and any advice welcome!

Very many thanks, nothing like advice from someone that’s actually experienced things first hand.

I can only assume that OVO want to dissuade anyone from being a FiT customer.  Short sighted thinking, as some (like us) will blacklist them as a future energy supplier as well. 

Shame, as I thought their Economy 7 tariff was a good match for us, slightly cheaper than any other supplier for our usage pattern.  I’ll happily pay a couple of quid more for electricity if a supplier’s service is good though. 

Off to do some shopping around amongst FiT providers now to try and see if I can compare the service they offer.  Who knows, whoever I choose as a FiT provider may also end up being our energy supplier if their customer service is good.

I appreciate that Octopus may have changed, but am reluctant to deal with them.  We had a dreadful time with them;  they still owe us money from around 5 years ago.  Once bitten, twice shy, and all that. 

Long story but we were transferred to them when Iresa went bust.  Cost us a great deal of money as they mixed up our meter numbers (we were billed thousands of pounds for someone else’s usage). 

Octopus were quite the worst company I’d ever dealt with then, and to cap it all they signed off every letter with some sort of hippy “love and peace” message.  Didn’t go down well when they owed us well north of a thousand pounds at one point.  “Love and peace” was not high on my list of sentiments towards them!  Needed to get Ofgem/the ombudsman to sort them in the end (not a quick and easy process - I gave up trying to get the last bit of cash back).

EDF is our current supplier but I can’t see how to move our FiT to them.  I keep searching on their website help section and there don’t seem to be any entries that even mention FiT.  May have to resort to phoning them.  Always a last resort with any supplier, as it will probably mean ages on hold or grappling with call centre staff that don’t have a script to cover my request.

My guess is that few FiT providers really want to transfer the money they get from the government to customers if they can help it.

What sorcery is this you’ve used? 

I spent ten minutes or so searching their website for FIT (just gives info on illness and disability stuff), Feed in Tariff (just gives info on energy tariffs) and couldn’t find this key bit of info at all!

I’ll call the number in that link tomorrow, just to check out the detail of their payment scheduling.  I don’t want to go through the palaver of switching to find that they are no better than OVO.

Many thanks for the link, much appreciated!

I would have stayed with SSE had that been an option.  Better the devil you know, and all that.  SSE had really turned their FiT game around recently, rapid payments and no glitches.  They weren’t always like this, but my immediate reaction to being told by OVO I need to wait 11 weeks to get money owed to me  was not favourable.

At least SSE paid up within three to four weeks in recent years, sometimes faster than that.  11 weeks delay is a bloody joke - this is MY money OVO are holding on to, not theirs.  They are just an administrator in the middle.  If a bank refused to clear a payment they’d recieved for 11 weeks they would quickly lose all their customers.  This is no different, no matter how they try to dress it up with their “levelling up” BS.

If SSE could pay me quickly then there is absolutely no reason why OVO cannot do the same.  Excuses about internal processes are not valid reasons for dire performance.  If an internal process is slow then change it, don’t use it as an excuse to fob off customers.

Well, strictly speaking OVO is entitled to claw back overpayments. If you kept the money aside then this should be easy to sort out. Once paid back, I imagine you’ll never hear from the FiT Team again, other than maybe to provide some kind of receipt or confirmation of the payment going through.

In those cases, simply fling it back via Bank Transfer. I recommend including some kind of reference like your (old) FiT/SEG account number if possible to make things easier for the team.

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend that. Bad things may happen if OVO is forced to prise the money out of your account. That email is an official invoice by the looks of things and if it is one, it can be enforced.

Per the terms at https://www.ovobyus.com/m/141a86efcfa043b3/original/statement-of-terms-fit.pdf

I’m just one of the forum volunteers who gives advice here. We don’t work for the company, nor get paid for our time.