Keeping an eye on our utility bills

Never, ever have I been one keeping an eye on our utility bills.  Thankfully Rachel has and this crept into our conversation the other day.  Just as well really as we were storing up a potential poke in the eye.

This involved me helping with reading the meter.  Now all this was a surprise for me; I knew we had a smart meter and naively had assumed it was read by magic.  Well, maybe not quite magic but at least some external method which didn’t involve contorting oneself under the stairs, pressing this and that button four times and trying to make sense of the scrolling numbers before they disappeared.  Having Economy 7 electricity makes this even worse as you then need two sets of numbers for the reading to be complete.  To think this is done several times a year and is meant to be customer focussed progress is enough to make me raise my eyebrows (I’m being polite here!).

Now I better understand why Rachel may feel the need to express her frustrations in certain ways.  I think I’d better leave that for another time although in my previous post I eluded to the temptation of throwing the phone out of the window and landing in the garden pond.

Before we switched to buying our gas and electricity from Octopus we were disloyal customers of whoever would give us a good deal.    However, in the last couple of years Octopus has, it is fair to say, been very cost effective for us and we have remained loyal.  They have also been pleasant to deal with, now that makes a refreshing change these days.

Regular readers will know we have a spreadsheet where we budget for different costs in the year ahead and then update it as the actual costs come in each month.  Sometimes we are under, or over, but most of the time we are reasonably close to our budgeted amount. So this is all good, or so you might think.

We have had an extraordinarily good deal with our energy costing £63 a month.  Now considering we have an ordinary 3 bedroom house and I like to keep it at 25c in the winter, that’s not bad at all.  Plus we seem to freely use electricity for as many lights and gizmos as we fancy.  We haven’t needed to hold back.

And then we got talking about this and how good it was.  It was then Rachel mentioned not seeing an electricity bill since October last year.  Yep October, about 8 months!!!!  I freaked.

So without further ado, Rachel called Octopus to query what we were being billed for.  Fair play to Octopus, they put their hands up straight away and admitted their mistake.  They confirmed they hadn’t billed us for any electricity since October last year – this added up to around £120 – which Rachel then paid straight away.  There didn’t seem any point in stringing this out any further.

This was a narrow escape for us.  We could have blindly carried on just paying for our gas and not the electricity.  And yet we all know, because life is like that, these things would eventually catch up with us and we would be left with a huge unexpected bill to pay.  Much better to stay on top of things and to generally keep an eye on these things, for our peace of mind.

One thing which is important to me is not swinging towards being a complete nerd on this.  While I am sure some people get the very best deal on EVERYTHING life is just too short to fret about these things, unless there is a pressing need.

So there ya go.  It is good to keep an eye on bills, pay whatever is due, treat suppliers and their staff well but please let’s not become nerdy.