Get An Extra £200 In The Bank!

Probably millions of us are owed hundreds of pounds each by our gas and electricity suppliers. With one quick call you could have a cheque in the post next week!

If I was you, I wouldn't have clicked on this article. Any headline that promises easy money is doomed to be a con, or to over promise.

However, in this case, I'm not telling you some spurious, hyped-up way to make £200, but how you can quickly get money you've overpaid back from your energy supplier. This applies to anyone on a fixed direct debit (or even people who have been relying on estimated meter readings for many months).

The idea with fixed direct debits is that you're supposed to underpay in winter and overpay in summer, but mostly we're roughly even in winter, and we're vastly overpaying in summer.

This year, many people on fixed direct debits came through winter in credit, or with only small deficits. Since then, gas and electricity prices have come down, but, for many, the supplier left the direct debit unchanged or, worse still, increased it! The only cases I've heard of underpaying is where the companies have forgotten to bill people or to take the direct debit payments.

I had my direct debit increased inappropriately, as did some of my friends. Our discussion-board users have also reported that they have overpaid considerably. Furthermore, the staff at Xelector, which powers our gas and electricity comparison service, found that all of them were in credit by at least £200 each. A couple of them were owed £400.

If just 40% of households (10 million) are in credit by £200, that's £2bn of our money they've got! I don't know when the suppliers were intending to give this money back, but I reckon they'd be quite happy to keep a buffer of our money indefinitely. But we should have it in our savings accounts, or to reduce our debts, or even to spend.

How to check whether you're in credit and get a refund

It's a simple, two-step process:

1. Go to your meter and note down the numbers on the display.
2. Call your supplier, give them the meter reading and ask whether you are in credit. If the answer is yes, ask for a new bill to be issued and request that any credit be repaid to you. The operator might try to convince you that they should hold on to the money and use it against future gas and electricity use, but ask yourself whether you really want to give your multi-billion pound utility company a free loan, and then ask for your money back!

There is the outside chance that you might be in debit (meaning, you owe the supplier money), in which case the supplier might need to increase the amounts you pay. We hope this doesn't happen to you, but you could use the opportunity to get yourself on a cheaper rate.

Tips for better housekeeping

As nice as it may seem to get this windfall, you really don't want it to happen again. It's much better to not give them the extra money in the first place. Fixed direct-debit tariffs may be a lot cheaper than old-fashioned quarterly billing, but you must do it properly. Here's what you could do:

• If you've had an increase to your direct debit-payments, consider writing to them to reduce it. (For more on this, read Stop Your Gas Bill From Rising 180%!)
• Set up a reminder to call your supplier with a meter reading every quarter, to make sure they don't build up too large a stockpile of your money.

Here are the appropriate telephone numbers of the major suppliers, plus cheaper alternatives I found on Saynoto0870.com:

Useful telephone numbers

Let us know

If your supplier has done this to you, please let us know which one it is and what you got back by posting a message on the Utilities discussion board.

> Save even more money! Rather than calling your supplier for a refund, if you switch suppliers, your old energy supplier will credit you the difference and you'll save more money on your new tariff. We reckon the average switcher is saving £162 a year at the moment, so compare gas and electricity prices.