SSE Airtricity left one of its customers frazzled and confused by telling her that her account was in credit and then arrears and then credit and then arrears and then credit again all within a matter of weeks.
Orla moved to SSE Airtricity in March of last year “as their rate for solar energy returned to the grid was the best on the market,” the email begins.. “This amount was reduced during my contract and I have wondered if this may have been the source of some of the problems along the way – however I still have no idea.”
She says we might be able to imagine her shock as a Direct Debit (DD) customer when she received a phone call on February 6th 2025 “to tell me I owed them €147.07. The most recent bill I had received told me I was in credit due to the recent payment from the micro generation.”
She said this to the person on the other end of the phone “and he instantly said that he saw I paid by DD and to ignore the call”.
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So that is what she did. In fact, she says, she “presumed it was a scam and went on about my day. Until I checked my app and found that, according to it, I had been in arrears for months, despite paying bills fully via DD”.
So she decided to contact SSE Airtricity via its private messaging service on X.
She was told that there was “an issue with updated data from the smart meter. I thought the smart meters were introduced to avoid this! And that rather than being in arrears of €147.07, they owed me €520.99”.
Happy days. All this messing had taken her the guts of a month to work out but no matter. it was resolved.
“I knew my contract was ending in March so I intended to pay off my last bill, get any refunds due to me, and move to a new provider, which I did,” Orla writes.
“And that was that, until May 13th. I received a call from SSE Airtricity to tell me that my account was in arrears and asked if I wished to pay in instalments. You can imagine the panic in my chest when I heard the words ‘pay in instalments.’ How much did I owe? And once again, why had it not come out as a direct debit,’ she asks.
And how much did she owe? What was the debt that necessitated a call in the middle of her working day and the offer of a payment plan to clear the debt on an account that she thought had been successfully closed?
It was €49.51.
“I explained once again that I paid by DD and the lady told me I could wait for the amount to go by DD but to expect continued calls and emails until that date. So, a few days later, I received an email and I paid the remaining money by card and thought I was done,” she says.
The saga was not, however, over.
A couple of weeks passed and she received an email to say that they were refunding me €49.51 as my account was being closed.
“Thankfully, at all points in this saga, I have been able to afford the amount I supposedly owed them. However, for lots of people, an unexpected bill of any amount might push them over the edge for that month. You’ll also notice the pattern, each time I received a call to say I owed an amount, eventually it turned out I didn’t and that money was refunded,” she writes.
She wonders that if this is happening to her then is it happening to others too.
We contacted SSE Airtricity and received the following statement.
“We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to this customer due to errors in the way their account was managed,” it begins.
“This customer’s billing and usage were out of sync, and this is not the standard of service we aim to deliver. We recognise that we fell short in this instance. We have reviewed the customer’s account in detail and will be addressing the issues identified with the relevant teams as part of our ongoing training and service improvement efforts.”
The statement said the company have “reached out to the customer directly to apologise and to offer a gesture of goodwill for the level of service received in this instance”.
