How did a hefty electricity credit turn into a huge debt?

“A couple of years ago I ran up a hefty credit with Electric Ireland, despite being on a monthly equal pay [billing arrangement], and regularly logging my meter details,” begins a mail from a reader called Conn.

A hefty credit sounds like a good thing to Pricewatch, but what might have been a positive story quickly turned into a most frustrating one, which our reader has found it impossible to resolve despite multiple attempts to make things right.

After running up all the credit, Electric Ireland decided to run it down by charging Conn a much-reduced rate.

So far so good. But not for long.

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“When that debt had been cleared, they continued to charge me a reduced rate,” he says. At one stage he was paying as little as €17 a month, when his normal electricity bill would have been around €90.

“I rang them a couple of times and pointed out that I was now going to accrue a debt (as prices started to rise). They replied that it would even out, and not to be worried,” he writes.

He should have worried though, and it wasn’t long before he ended up with a debt that hit €1,000.

[ Pricewatch: Will energy prices remain high for the foreseeable future? ]

“Despite letters, emails and phone calls, all I got in return was a patronising lecture on how equal pay works. All the Government subsidies were swallowed up by the debt, and recently they have reduced my equal pay monthly bill to below what I’m using, so the debt is ticking up again.”

He notes that he told Electric Ireland this would happen and adds that he pays on direct debit, has never missed a payment and never been in debt with the company.

By way of an aside he says he brought this up in a number of Electric Ireland forums, “and one of the questions I have been asked is why didn’t I bring it up before now. The answer is that I knew it would involve endless emails, letters and contact with harassed call centre staff – and it has. We were in the middle of a pandemic and I didn’t have the bandwidth for that. We are now in cost-of-living crisis and all the State help is being swallowed up by the debt I had no hand, act or part in accruing.”

[ Lack of meter reading leaves vulnerable couple with €5,000 bill ]

He says that he is on a smart meter and has been for a while “so this is even more frustrating as they have my data to hand. I’ve attached by latest bill.”

We contacted Electric Ireland and received the following statement.

“Electric Ireland offers Equaliser products to help customers spread their energy payments more evenly across the year and thus help with household budgeting. Electric Ireland does not generally comment in detail on individual customers. However, we acknowledge a series of shortcomings in this case, both in the application of the Equaliser product and related communication. This undoubtedly caused undue frustration to the customer, all the more so given how hard the last two years have been. We will be making contact with the customer in question today (September 14th) to acknowledge these shortcomings and provide a satisfactory resolution to the matter.”