Baileywoos v scottish hydro

[baileywoos]

Right, we have a dispute going with scottish hydro and I really don't know where to take it next. I have emailed the ombudsman but have not recieved a reply. (could someone give me the email address so I can check I had it right).

Basically we were on a meter since 2000. This meter was gobbling up money even though we weren't living here and the house was empty.
We moved up here in 2003 and always thought we were paying too much but struggled to get any info of our account as Scottish hydro never issue statements for the meters. We found the no statement bit especially strange as we were always in credit when we had an elec meter in England.
Anyway we decided to tell them to get rid of the meter and we'd pay by quarterly bill. The man comes along and changes the meter and informs us that we were paying for E7 even though the heaters were taken out years ago. Never mind!
Anyway we got a bill 2 months later for over £400 for 2 months elec. So we queried the bill and they sent a man out to put a meter next to ours and check it 6 weeks later. When this was done they said the meter showed ours to be correct and running fine.
So we cut down everything possible. The heating is a log fire anyway, no other heaters are used, the tumble dryer wasn't used, all outside lights stayed off, nothing left on standby etc etc.
3 months later we got our next bill - over £600.
We rang Scottish Hydro and the people we spoke to all agreed that that seemed an excessive amount but because the meter was fine, they washed their hands of it.
No way can we pay all that so we've asked them to put a card meter back on.

Where can we go from here? There is no way our 3 bedroom temp accomodation is using all this electric. We are really careful of what is left on, we've put energy saving bulbs everywhere and do as much as we can to conserve energy. Friends in the area using electric heaters, power tools etc etc are paying a fraction of what we are.

Any ideas???????

[nick49]

to be honest it sounds like their customer service is not the best so i'd say change supplier. make sure your account is set up as domestic and not commercial i know that sounds stupid but it does happen.
also if it was left emptyfor a while, i'd check that no one is tapping your supply.

[demon_x_slash]

Originally Posted by nick49

also if it was left emptyfor a while, i'd check that no one is tapping your supply.

That could be an explanation. Nick, what would the OP have to do to verify this? Would there be a wire/pipe s/he could track to any hijacking connection? Would s/he need to turn everything off for 12 hours and take a before-and-after reading?

[baileywoos]

I don't think it can be that though cos the meter box is connected to the outside wall of the house. For someone to tap into it wouldn't they have to tap in from the wires as they leave the meter? In which case we'd see some kind of wire wouldn't we? I assume that tapping into a supply before it hits our meter box would not make a difference to our bill as we only get charged for what is used through the meter? Make sense???????????
We live on 4 acres of land and there is no buildings past us anyway, we're the last.

[Ruthie P]

It would be very obvious that the supply had been tapped, wires everywhere, and lets face it, if youre tapping a supply youre not going to hang around and make sure the jobs nice and neat.... do you know or can you get me the readings from the check meter and the main meter from when the check meter was installed and from when it was removed on both, if you can get me these i can work out if the meter is ok or not for you, you never know, they may not have checked this for you....i do this on a regular basis so know how to work it out for you and can put it into % of how its running (fast or slow), just to check what scottish power have said is right....