My recent experiences with British Gas. Apologies for the length of the post but it's been quite a saga.

As my electricity and gas meters were over 20 years old and I had been getting emails and phone calls from British Gas about smart meters I went ahead with the meters being changed.

This was done on 21 July. The change of meters should have been done in no more than 3 hours. However the engineer was accompanied by an auditor checking up on his work. The auditor was not helpful and as a result it took 3 hours for just the gas meter to be changed. Then the auditor left and the engineer moved on to the electric meter.

He discovered that the fuse box between the meter and the ground supply was not one he'd come across before, contacted head office for advice who didn't know. So WPD (Western Power Distribution) was called out to open the fuse box, being their responsibility, not British Gas. There was a delay at WPD meaning that quite some time elapsed before they turned up. Didn't take them long though and the engineer was able to complete the work on the electic meter.

The engineer then started trying to commission the meters, ie so that data would get sent from the meters to British Gas automatically and to the personal monitor where customers can check their usage, make budgets, check the meter reading etc. He'd been here for quite some time and was only able to get the electric meter sending data to British Gas and nothing to the monitor. So he called it a day and arranged to come back to complete the commission on August 24. He'd been here six and a half hours. I don't have an issue with him, as the delay was caused by the auditor and WPD being late. Also the meters themselves were working and no effect on supply apart from the few minutes where the elctric fusebox was opened for the powere to be turned off, then turned on again.

On August 24 another engineer came and commissioned the gas meter so that it was sending data to British Gas. Didn't take long. He didn't realise that the previous engineer didn't leave the personal monitor with me and didn't have one. I'm not concerned by that as my daily usage of power is fairly consistent and I should be able to see how much I use each day on my online account with the smartdata. I had already looked at that for the electricty meter.

The idea with smart meters is that I no longer need to send meter readings to British Gas for my bills as the smart meters send the data automatically.

So I was a bit surprised when on the 27th I got an email from them asking me to supply the gas meter reading. I decided to have a look at my account online and discovered that there was no daily data available for the 25th or 26th on the gas account. Also there was now none for the electricity for 24th, 25th or 26th. I sent them an enquiry about this on that day. On the 31st I checked and there was no data for the subsequent days. I did send them a note of my gas meter reading in case there was a problem so that they could do a gas bill rather than estimate it.

Later on the 31st I got a phone call from them about the smart readings issue saying that it would be passed to their smart meters department for investigation and they would contact me in 5 days.

Actually they didn't contact me until today. The smart readings issue had been resolved and I checked that I was getting data as from 1 September to date. It seems that there was a problem with their computers and that this problem has affected other customers data (the meters are fine, the readings are getting through, it's just that there are gaps in the smart meter data on your online account for some days).

It's clear that British Gas have been having computer problems. I discovered on 21 August that although the electric direct debit for early August had gone through my bank, the gas one due on 6 August had not. I informed British Gas of this. They contacted me a few days later to say that this had affected lots of other customers and I agreed to pay my August direct debit by card. I was told that the September one would go through as normal.