Thank you.
For me, there is not congruently a fixed billing month.
I get a reminder email to send a reading about the 23rd of each calendar month.
Notionally my readings are due on 28th of each month. I wanted the last day of each month but they could not dp that as they had to have a day in the month number that is in every month, so the 28th as a compromise. I could have chosen any number from 1 to 28.
In practice I send it sometime within a week of that. At a ratechangetide
, I send an extra one on the final day of the month, such as 31 March and 30 September, gathering the day reading near to midnight.
I send two readings.
Night is from 10:30 am GMT to 7:30 am GMT.
Day is from 7:30 am GMT to 00:30 am GMT the next day.
So in BST (British summer time) that is 01:30 am to 8:30 am and 8:30 am to 01:30 am the bext day on clocks.
The meter is above the back door with a liquid crystal display.
The display shows the reading for the tariff in use (ie night or day).
There is a blue button that can be pressed to give all the available data, press by press, shown for a while, then drops back.
But there are various things like the date, the sum modulo one hundred thousand of the two readings, and the two readings.
So I usually gather readings by noting the night reading just before switchover of tariffs and the day reading after switchover of tariffs. Not only does this meamn that I do not need to push the blue button, it makes it easier, because I usually need to shine the flashlight of my mobile phone on nthe display to be able to view it clearly.
Thus far the supplier has accepted my word of what are the readings as nobody else has read the meter since before the 2020 lockdown. The readings are correct.
As it happens, as I want/need a warm house, my bills are somewhat larger than the media headline annual cost, so maybe the large size of the bills means they have no concerns over the credibility of the readings.
Maybe they have it programmed that the £66 gets credited when the electricity for the last day of the month has been charged. That would seem a sensible way to do it. I gathered the readings on 30 November 2022, but as they always treat it as up to the end of the day before the readings are taken, the bill goes up to 29 November 2022.
William