Energy costs may have been higher than usual over the past few weeks given the recent cold snap – but one MoneySaver got a REAL shock when checking her smart meter.
Sainsbury’s Energy customer Janette McAdam, 59, found she’d apparently racked up a bill of more than £100,000 in just one day, and is used to her rogue smart meter regularly telling her she’s using £10,000s’ worth of electricity.
She’s been reassured it’s just a technical blip, and that she won’t be liable for the costs – but it’s still a pretty unnerving malfunction.
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On Monday 5 March, Janette’s smart meter display showed that at just after 1pm, she owed £63,789, at a rate of £4,907 an hour – as her photo below shows:
And a further picture from Wednesday 7 March shows that by the evening Janette’s bill ‘so far today’ had topped £100,000. In fact, the figure’s so large it can’t even fit on the screen:
What’s causing the problem?
When we spoke to Janette last week, she told us she simply didn’t know. She said she’d had her smart meters changed after switching to Sainsbury’s Energy last year and was told that her new gas smart meter had a problem, but that it would be fixed.
She started noticing problems with her electricity smart meter, which is the one pictured, later.
She told us: “I noticed that there was a red light, which I don’t really look at very much.
“Every evening my smart meter can go up to over a hundred grand of electricity used.
“Of course I phoned up and they said that they were aware of it and that it was a blip and of course not correct – I was not to worry as the electricity meter was still monitoring the electricity and also the gas in the usual way, and that they were getting round to me to sort the problem out.”
We contacted Sainsbury’s Energy to find out what’s gone wrong, but it referred us to British Gas (Sainsbury’s Energy is a ‘white label’ of British Gas – in other words the same company but using a different brand). British Gas said it had a policy of not commenting to MoneySavingExpert on issues relating to “individual customers”.
