Customers of every energy firm from British Gas to E.On to OVO and EDF and Utilita or Octopus are being urged to take a meter reading as soon as possible before midnight on Monday.
That’s because energy prices will shoot up 10 percent on Tuesday at 00.01 am and if you haven’t taken a meter reading, there’s a possibility your energy supplier might inadvertently mischarge you at the higher rate for previous usage.
Energy prices will go up by 10 percent thanks to Ofgem increasing the price cap, meaning £100 worth of usage on Monday will cost £110 on Tuesday.
Smart meters are constantly updating but they don’t necessarily send the information to your supplier every minute of every day and in fact some suppliers only ‘read’ your meter every few days or even weeks.
If, for example, you use a lot of energy on Monday, trying to take advantage of the cheaper prices before the price cap goes up, but you don’t take a meter reading until Wednesday, your energy supplier might average out your usage and assume that at least some of your usage on Monday actually happened on Tuesday, and therefore will overcharge you for energy units you actually used on the cheaper rate.
To avoid this, you should take a meter reading as close to midnight as possible on Monday – or as late as you can before you go to bed – and then again early on Tuesday morning.
This ensures that what you use is as accurate as possible.
You can also submit a meter reading in several days’ time and backdate it to Monday or Tuesday if you forget to submit it on the day – this is because energy websites used to crash with the volume of people trying to submit readings at the same time, so now they allow you to backdate it to space it out.
It might be tempting to try to submit more units of energy on your Monday reading to cheat and get more units for less, but this is fraud and is illegal.
The best way to beat the price cap is to fix – right now there are some fixes from EDF, Outfox The Market and E.On that will effectively wipe out the price cap entirely, Martin Lewis says.