please empty your brain below

Even if you're not a "shower person" now could be the time to install an electric shower. It's usually a fairly simple job. Might be quicker than waiting for your gas to be uncondemned.

dg writes: This is not going to happen.
That's the worst excuse I've ever heard, even from customer service...if it's invented then surely they should hire people with more imagination! If it's true, on the other hand, then...well...I can't find polite words stronger than "immoral" to describe it.

There must be thousands of people who just don't check their bills closely, and get fooled by this sort of rubbish.
DG, not much sympathy re Thames Water: out here in the sticks I have a meter buried in the driveway entrance that I can't read and TW need a special piece of kit to take their half yearly readings. When my compost heap caught fire, no kidding, I had to leave the hose working for a considerable while but I was still able to call TW afterwards for a free intermediate reading.

It is surely common sense for utility customers to take regular readings eg gas and electricity weekly or monthly and water perhaps monthly or quarterly. I now know that the super big telly is an energy hog so watch things like news programmes on the computer.
You say kitchen appliances - do you mean the cooker, or is the water/immersion heater in the kitchen, did he say why it/they were unsafe?

dg writes: Yes.
I once had an estimated gas and electric bill that was way over what I had used. So I submitted the new, much lower reading.

Lo, did I mysteriously find a human at my house to check the meter readings a few weeks later.
Thames Water are useless at billing. They sent me a bill with my water usage at zero. I wrote to them and pointed out the meter was faulty. They did nothing.

Six years later they tried to back bill me for the actual consumption. I refused and won because I'd alerted then to the problem and they did nothing about it.
If it's any consolation, we live in a house that was previously someone's holiday home. The electric people stubbornly refuse to estimate we might use more electricity than they did
the water privatisation is a complete rip-off

there is no choice, hence no free market
I had a gas bill that was wrong. I submitted an accurate reading which was less than the previous estimate. But they only estimated it because the smart meter wasn't working anymore (not change of supplier just stopped working after a software upgrade).

The system decided that because I had a smart meter their estimate had to be accurate and my actual reading had to be wrong. Not helped by the fact that the solar panels mean that I use no gas at all in the summer months so they thought my reading implausible given the last actual reading. That took ages to sort out.
I keep being offered to have a smart meter installed... This paper goes into the shredder.

A "smart" meter is really really dumb...

dg writes: We've 'done' smart meters.
It looks like DG will be visiting Argos for a mini oven soon.
Condolences DG. From my historic (and not recent)experience, it takes six boiled kettles for a shallow but decently warm bath. If not, I shall await a review of public washing facilities in Tower Hamlets.
Bert is right, there's no choice domestically. However, there is now a choice commercially. What this means for my small business is that the rights to supply water and dispose of wastewater have been sold to two separate businesses, who in turn have been sold/rebranded (God knows), and opened up more opportunities for scamming middlemen to try and flog me a move to yet another supplier. It's a farce, I have a business to run, and it's just another source of aggravation.
The drinking water, meanwhile, is often so chlorinated as to be undrinkable - something a nominal "change of supplier" wouldn't affect at all.
Best way to use less bath water is to get fat. More displacement = less £
i've got an "assessed" bill, since Thames Water were unable to fit a meter. my bill is just over 250 quid a year. i've sometimes wondered how much less it would be if TW had installed a meter ... and the answer from this post is not a huge amount !

dg writes: I saved 40% by moving to a meter.
What a pity that both the old and "new" Roman Road baths are long gone. DG could have visited there for his daily ablutions.
Thames Water is known for organisational incompetence - if you're not on a meter they are legally entitled to send you a bill for whatever they like.

You can't challenge it, even if the consumption they claim is physically impossible. Only with the Consumer Council for Water (website: www.ccwater.org.uk) involved do they start to reconsider. Bitter experience of a three month battle over my elderly Mum's blackmail by Thames Water earlier this year - she'd been overcharged for over ten years - all legal, as long as they decide it's not feasible (= costs too much) to install water meters.

The water consumer only exists to make them money.
If you can access and read your own meter, you can report your readings online. But indeed that particular operative doesn't seem to have been well-trained.

FWIW, before I had a meter, Thames Water did alert me that I appeared to be using more water than normal, and I discovered my bathroom cistern was emptying almost as fast as it was filling. Bit of a shock to pay for what had passed through my pipes, so to speak, but a good incentive to get a meter, which knocked my bills down quite substantially from the old rating system.
I somewhat worry that there might be someone in charge (or even in power) who's taking a dislike of your blogs and plotting to drive you out of London. Two utility incidents in a row is not something to be easily brushed off as coincidence.
I had occasion to phone Thames Water a few months ago and they were really helpful. Meter readings supplied regularly, though. Out here in the Norfolk outback, the water people have installed a meter even though I won't go on to a metered supply. They just like to check up on me, it seems.
DG was your 40% saving against a rated bill, or against an "assessed" bill (where they try and install a meter, and then give you a discount for not being able to) ?
As Flanders & Swann sang: "'Twas on a Monday morning, the gas man came to call"

I look forward to the rest of the saga.
Many moons ago (when I first moved to London before moving several times and far away thereafter), he estimable Thames Water sent me a very large bill that turned out to be for an entire block of flats for considerably longer than the 6 months I had lived in one of them!
Thames Water online billing is surprisingly good. I submitted my reading yesterday evening and got an updated bill today. And they automatically reduced my direct debit because I used less water than last time (those water saving freebies they give out do actually work!)
I pay $160 US dollars for 1 month of water here in Las Vegas....and my water passes through the hydroelectric dam than supplies my electrical power and that bill is over $300 US dollars during the summer months. I need to move to England just to save money.
We had much fun with one of the electricity providers, who had somehow got our Day and Night readings mixed up (we're on an Economy 7 tariff). Every time they did, we'd ring up and get them to correct it, then come the next bill it'd have been switched back.
Well, wouldn't you know it! Headline news on BBC TV London this afternoon - a comprehensive report about Thames Water's woeful performance. Coincidence or what?
TW installed a compulsory water meter last September. In February they wrote to me telling me I had a leak. OK I knew we had a leak, it was a failing shower valve that was passing 15L per hour but we were not metered so what! We tried to find plumbers to remove the bath and old shower, replace the tiles in the area affected, make good etc. One quote was £1500 for a weeks work. Others never bothered. Luckily our next door neighbour was having some work done and recommended their builder. He charged use £800 all in and did a brilliant job over last weekend. I logged onto TW to check my account. There were no water meter readings, and yet TW have copies of all our bills back to 2013 on their system. Funny thing is despite it now being a whole year they still have not activated our water meter. So we have no real idea if a meter would save use any money because we wont be drinking, cooking or washing any less!
I have received my updated water bill, and it's back below £100 again. So that's good.
I remember a gas engineer coming to service my boiler. He said the flue was broken and that he hadn't got one on the van and put a yellow do not use sticker on the boiler. I said, "How am I going to heat the house?". Then he said, "Well if you take it off once I've gone and use it that's up to you". & dear reader that's what I did ;-)










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