Estimated bills
Why have I received an estimated bill when I have a smart meter?
There are two reasons why you might receive an estimated bill despite having a smart meter.
1) We are not receiving meter readings from your smart meter. This may be because your meters are not commissioned (the smart capabilities have not been activated) or because they have fallen off the wide area network (WAN) and require recommissioning.
If you have requested that your meters are not commissioned, or you have denied permission for us to read them, then your bills will be estimated unless you send us a meter reading.
If your meters should be sending us meter readings but are not, contact us and we will attempt to (re)commission your meters remotely. If we are not able to do this, we may need to send an engineer to commission the meter on site, but we will let you know if this is the case.
In your email, include an accurate meter reading from your meter. You can find instructions on how to do this here.
If your gas meter is more than 10 meters from your electricity meter, or there is some obstruction like a wall between the meters, then it may be that we are not able to commission your gas meter and you will need to send us meter readings manually. This is because the gas meter can only communicate locally and sends its meter readings to your electricity meter, which then sends both meter readings off via the wide area network.
In future, we hope to be able to offer dual band comms hubs to customers in this situation. This will boost the signal capability of gas meter and allow it to communicate with your electricity meter and so send us meter readings.
2) Your smart meter read frequency preference is set to monthly. This means that we are only able to draw one meter reading from your meters per month so if we need to bill you between these meter readings for any reason then we will have to bill you to estimated meter readings. To resolve this, contact us and request that your smart meter read frequency preference be updated to either daily or half-hourly.
Why have I received an estimated bill when I submitted a meter reading?
There are several reasons why you might receive an estimated bill even though you’ve submitted meter readings.
1) We did not receive the meter readings you submitted. This might be due to a system error or because you mistyped your information when submitting on the website. Try submitting your meter readings again and be sure that you have typed your account number and meter serial number correctly.
2) We received your meter readings, but they were quarantined because they were deemed to be too low or too high. This can often happen if we’ve been estimating your bills for some time. To resolve this, email us a picture of your meter and we will review this and release a bill to you.
3) We received your meter reading and have used it to bill you, however we have billed you from an estimated meter reading because it is the reading we charged up to on your last bill. To avoid this in future, be sure to provide us with monthly meter readings so actual meter readings are always used.