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Disgruntled Octopus customer here 🙋
Here’s a story and a question if you can stick with it long enough…
I’ve been on Octopus Go for coming up to 3 years now, for the first 2 years everything’s been fine with the electric side of things, Smart meter working properly etc. but the Gas meter never sent it’s readings so I supplied manual readings for gas. Bit annoying, but no big deal.
October last year my gas shut off, turned out the battery in the meter had gone flat. New meter fitted that day and gas back on. At the same time they also replaced the top half (the comms bit?) of the electric meter. All was well for about 2 weeks, both my gas & electric readings were getting automatically sent to Octopus - yay!
Then one day in October my electric meter stopped sending readings and has never connected again. I’ve been hassling them for months to get it sorted. They finally offered to bill me based on manual readings, which I duly sent them 3 of - peak, off-peak & total.
Imagine my surprise when I find they’be switched me to Flexible Octopus Tariff and charged me all of my useage at effectively the peak rate. My Octopus Go is (was?!) guaranteed until August 2023.
They say their t&cs says they will do this, but as they effectively broke my working meter I’m not very happy about this.
Can anyone offer any advice please or had to deal with the same thing?
I’ll be writing to Ofgem too for advice.
Cheers if you’ve stuck with all that!
In the absence of half hourly smart meter data, we will charge you as we would a customer on our Flexible Octopus variable tariff, based on typical consumption patterns (known as “Profile 1”).
Octopus Go is a beta product. This means some things may not work first time or may break and that on occasion data issues with smart meters can take significant time to fix or prevent things working at all. You will always be able to switch to one of our fairly priced standard tariffs at any time.
I'm not sure you can prove that they 'broke' your meter and the T&Cs (that you agreed to) fairly clearly state that if things go wrong they can/will charge you on the variable tariff.
This seems to confirm my feeling that smart meters are there for the benefit of the supplier rather than the consumer. The touted 'benefits' (such as variable rates) can be negated by actions such as this in the event of a fault. For those not on variable rates, the only benefit seems to be not having to read a meter once a quarter! Wow! As for monitoring your consumption, does anyone not already know which appliances use a lot of leccy?
Yep Octopus are as happy to shaft you as any other company despite all the fluffy words and other bollox.
I moved a couple of years ago lured by Octopus Go from another green energy company giving me a differential tariff that had become less competitive.
naturally my existing smart meter turned out to be the wrong colour or whatever so they put me on their flexible tariff till the meter could be changed. Ok I thought its only a couple of months of full price leccy, no worries.
It took me over a year of chasing to get get the jokers to swap the meter, many failed attempts and by the time they had Putin had swung into Ukraine and fixed prices were off the scale. So when I finally got on Go it was twice as expensive as it would have been and they were only offereing 1 year fixed v the 2 years they had promised me.
So that only cost me about 1.5k extra then.
They are all the same
Similar issue to Winston - no sign of being able to get one of their smart meters. Never any slots in my area..
They are all the same
Maybe I’ve been lucky, I’m with Scottish Power, I had a Smart meter installed some time back, and two years ago British Gas, (who I have my service contract with), fitted a new boiler, along with a Hive system. It’s all been working fine, I really like the Hive, it’s so easy to tweak the heating on the fly, and the smart meter lets me see how usage changes through the day.
It took me over a year of chasing to get get the jokers to swap the meter,
I believe the pandemic stopped a lot of meter installs.
Then one day in October my electric meter stopped sending readings and has never connected again
My eon next meter did the same in October. It seems to send readings they can use but not I can see 😡. They are blaming a firmware issue.
You need to make a formal complaint to Octopus. They may or may not find in your favour, but if they don't you can escalate to the regulator. It costs them money every time they do this, so their interest is to fix the problem before it gets there.
Did their online platform show the 30 minute readings? Did you chase it?
You need to make a formal complaint to Octopus. They may or may not find in your favour, but if they don't you can escalate to the regulator. It costs them money every time they do this, so their interest is to fix the problem before it gets there.
They screwed up my billing on Octopus Go, and their first response was "not our problem". After asking to escalate it as a formal complaint the problem was mysteriously fixed and £100 compensation landed in my account.