Anyway, nothing in my experience tells me to anticipate a utility company billing correctly so I'd rather no give them a licence to take the amount.
I'm reminded of a few years back when Scottish Gas did an estimated reading, and decided to change my monthly payment to over £1200 per month. I was very grateful of the Direct Debit Guarantee, the charge was reversed very very fast.
What then happened was a lot of them claiming that they had the right reading, and it was the amount I was due etc... In the end there was a conclusion that the electricity meter was faulty, and they would replace the meter, and then use the first 3 months of use, as the basis to calculate the previous year and a bit. They installed the new meter, couple of months pass.
"High, please pay us the several thousand you owe"
"Um, that's not what we agreed."
"Well we analysed the meter we took out and found no fault."
"Are you sure about that"
"yes"
"Well i have the old meter in my hand, so I don't think you did any testing at all"
*silence*
Eventually it got as far as a court summons, at which point a call from a lawyer told them how stupid they were, and within 24 hours my bill had been written off, and we went to just using the numbers from the new meter...
Incompetent bunch of utter fuckwits.
I still have that old meter, sat in the server room... It's a proper old mechanical bakerlite thing.
Here in Amsterdam we got a new smart meter installed, including a smart gas meter. Despite my inquiries, noone can tell me what smart gas is. It wasn't a brand new meter, and had an existing reading on it. Which took a few weeks to sort out with them. I was glad I took photos within an hour of it being wired in. They could hardly claim I'd used a few megawatts within the first hour... on a 25 amp feed...
Why are meters so damn hard? you'd think energy companies would have got this sorted by now...
J