[DebF_EONNext]

Evening @Tylisha welcome to the community - you've had lot's of sound advice here.

If your Estimated Annual Consumption (EAC) doesn't reflect your actual usage you can request for a manual EAC review, this will go on your actual usage we can then do a manual payment adequacy review based on this information and then we can request for the industry to modify your EAC 😊

As the others have mentioned you also have the option of a variable direct debit where you pay for what you have used each month rather than a fixed amount. This won't affect your unit rates so you will still be billed at the same rates for what you use.

If you do set up variable direct debit it's really important if you don't have a smart meter that you make sure you send a regular monthly reading manually otherwise your bills would be estimated. 😊

[Tylisha]

There’s a lot cheaper than what I’m paying now, I’ve actually managed to switch tonight from EON to EDF, I was paying £180 per month and over paying, the comparison showed it would have cost me about £360 per year to stay on the eon next flex variable tariff, as apposed to switching to EDF ensure, which is £105 per month. I went back through my bills over the last 12 months and added together the kWh used through the year and used that to get a more accurate quote and EDF came up the cheapest. I’ve just found eon a general nightmare to deal with. Only time will tell if I’ve made a mistake in switching, but all being said, any overpayment is better off in my bank than in theirs.

Let’s hope this is the means to an end of a massive pain in the ass!!!

[meldrewreborn]

@Tylisha

i hope you are right about the pain ending but I doubt it will be. Prices rather than annual cost projections are what I compare, because annual projections introduce assumptions about consumption that can distort the picture.

Good luck with EDF. I have my Gas with them and their service has been acceptable - not perfect - but OK.

no need to leave the forum though, and answering my question on the EAC showing on you bills over past 2 years and whether you have had a smart meter installed would help us to help others.

[Mailman]

Originally Posted by DebF_EONNext

If your Estimated Annual Consumption (EAC) doesn't reflect your actual usage you can request for a manual EAC review, this will go on your actual usage we can then do a manual payment adequacy review based on this information and then we can request for the industry to modify your EAC 😊

I'd be interested to know how the Manual EAC review is carried out? Is it just the latest annualised advance? I'd never heard of the industry held EAC being able to be modified at the request of a supplier but hey-ho you live and learn.

The only way you can see what happens to the EAC v AA numbers is to collate usage data over a long period of time as I have done. Now I'm getting on for 2 years of data and still the gas is somewhat higher. In case you've not seen this before, I give you exhibit A (graph of EAC via my bills v annualised advance via my spreadsheet). Not disimilar but EAC is still above AA nearly 20 months in. I cannot help but feel that in cases where there is a clear discrepancy betwen the two sets of data, it has to be caused by an erroneous meter read that is subsequently rectified in the billing by an energy company. However the duff meter read is still fed into the Data Collector who generates a grossly-inflated EAC figure that takes years before it gets stripped out. It is just a theory I have with no evidence to corroborate I'm afraid.

[DebF_EONNext]

Originally Posted by Mailman

I'd be interested to know how the Manual EAC review is carried out? Is it just the latest annualised advance? I'd never heard of the industry held EAC being able to be modified at the request of a supplier but hey-ho you live and learn.

Morning @Mailman

A manual EAC review is exactly that just reviewing the data manually. We would use the actual readings on the account ideally over the last 12 months so we have a picture of summer/winter usage.

In the event where there are less readings for example: maybe the customer has just moved in or there has been a meter fault meaning we don't have many reads - then we would use the actual readings we have available to work out average daily usage and compare this to the industry average to work out a more accurate Estimated Annual Consumption.

We can then request this to be updated with the industry however we can't guarantee they will accept the request, but we can try!

We can do the same with the gas too so we can get a more accurate estimate of your AQ however I'm not 100% sure if we can request this to be updated with the industry 🤔 I need to question that one!

We can also do a manual payment adequacy review on the account and adjust payments accordingly if the EAC/AQ is out by a lot compared to your actual usage. This is why you will see me harp on so much about providing actual readings rather than having it estimated as it makes so much of a difference when calculating accounts 😉

[Mailman]

Originally Posted by DebF_EONNext

A manual EAC review is exactly that just reviewing the data manually. We would use the actual readings on the account ideally over the last 12 months so we have a picture of summer/winter usage.

..........


We can also do a manual payment adequacy review on the account and adjust payments accordingly if the EAC/AQ is out by a lot compared to your actual usage. This is why you will see me harp on so much about providing actual readings rather than having it estimated as it makes so much of a difference when calculating accounts 😉

I recall a number of years ago when I was with Breeze Energy who wanted me to start increasing my DD amount more than I thought it needed to. I recall a converstion where I was able to tell them what I had used over the previous 12 months and the CS agreed to my request that the DD was set more in line with my actual usage. This was in the era of cheaper energy (although not that much so with payments being in the region of £75 pcm back in 2017). Two years later in 2019 they wanted to increase it to £79.84 but I beat them down to £76.50 mainly because I was in credit and I knew my energy consumption at my old address. At no point in my phone call to them was a request from me to redo the EAC calculation and then request that the Data Collector re-do the EAC calcs.

The only time this (DD adjustment) really comes up is when the 3 monthly payments review throws out an over-inflated DD amount (which is based on the EAC rather than the AA (Annualised advance) and the customer rings up the energy to complain about the DD. At this point the CS can and will agree on a lower more realistic DD if they have readings approx 12 months apart. So roll on another 3 months or 6 months or whatever. The same thing now happens i.e the new EAC is still higher than the actual consumption and the DD is set too high again.

Why energy companies do not (as a rule) also quote the Actual Annual Usage (i.e. use over previous 12 months) instead of EAC is beyond me particularly for those of us on smart meters. 🤔

It matters not to those of us on VDD but those on non-VDD payment tariffs can, and do, tear their hair out over this (and will continue to do so). 👍

[meldrewreborn]

@Mailman

I’m on fixed DDs and have no smart meters and don’t have any particular problems in getting my payments to acceptable figures. But that’s because I consider myself an intelligent customer. While my EAC hasn’t quite moved as it should have, I’ve not had to loose any hair due to my energy suppliers, and my complaints - to quote the song “there’s been a few” recently have been directed elsewhere.

when a customer has been with a supplier for more than 12 months is there any justification in the supplier quoting the EAC at all?

[Mailman]

Originally Posted by meldrewreborn

when a customer has been with a supplier for more than 12 months is there any justification in the supplier quoting the EAC at all?

I just had a quick check on the bills of my in-laws (SMETS1) who used to be with Shell Energy (now an Octopus customer) and picked a couple of bills 12 months apart (Dec 2022 and Dec 2023). In said bills they quote Annual Usage and they appear way more accurate than my EAU numbers which makes me think they have used an annualised advance over 12 months - Electricity very close (1862 kWh Actual for v 1858 kWh bill Annual usage) and Gas just as impressively close (8703 kWh Actual v 8659 kWh Actual). The figures are both so close that I believe that Shell must have quoted the last 12 months in the statement rather than the EAU.

So I do believe that where actual annual consumption usage figures exist they should be used as a basis for any DD calculations rather than the industry generated EAU numbers which can be wildly out (in my case over 13% higher for gas usage!).

Edit: Roll on to the situation now with Octopus for my in-laws who clearly use EAU (like Eon Next). The latest bill from Octopus show a gas EAU of 10,200 kWh whereas the annualised advance over the last year has been approx 9400 kWh so the EAU for them is 8.5% higher than what they used in the previous 12 months. All the time they were with Shell it appears as though they were basing DD amounts on what they had consumed in the previous 12 months rather than the industry-inflated EAU numbers. Gas EAU numbers appear to be more inflated than the electricity EAU numbers from my experience.