Jane and I have spent an hour puzzling over our Scottish Hydro Electric electricity bill.
Last month (24 March) I received a letter from Scottish Hydro Electric informing us that our monthly direct debit amount must be increased, from £29.00 per month to £67.00 per month. I couldn’t believe it! That’s an enormous leap: about 2.3 times as much. How on earth did they come to that amount?!
After an hour of pouring over their figures I still have no idea how they came to that amount. Here’s what Jane and I discovered:
- We’ve been here for 23 months (from July 2003) and started direct debits of £29 in January 2004; up until then we paid by cheque or by Switch over the phone.
- Over the 23 months we’ve been billed a total of £694.67
- We’ve been paying £29.00 per month, direct debit, for all but six of those months
- It averages out at £99.24 per bill, ie roughly per quarter
- It also averages out at around £30.20 per month (£694.67 / 23 months)
So HOW in the name of OfGem did they arrive at a figure of £67.00 per month?!
What I did, in the end, was telephone them a couple of weeks ago and pay off the amount that they were claiming (£145.03 … from a bill that would have all equalled out during the summer!) and started again, paying £30.00 per month. But HOW did they come to £67 pm?!
