Your bill is calculated on the half-hourly meter readings we hold on the day it's issued. Where readings are missing, we bill on industry or internal estimates, and the breakdown on your invoice shows how much of the total readings that covers. This helps to keep your bills the size you expect, instead of a small bill now and a large correction in a few months.
Types of meter readings
Actual: sent from your meter when it’s able to send readings as normal. This reflects your site’s real energy usage or generation.
Industry estimates: a figure supplied by industry databases when your meter can't send a reading. They calculate what they expect your site to have used or generated, based on historical patterns.
Internal estimates: our own figure, built from your site's usage or generation profile. We use this where there is no industry data, or where the industry data shows zero for a site we know is running.
Note for generators: Internal estimates is the same as Forecast data you might have already seen as data source used for your billing. We’ve updated the term, but the way it’s estimated hasn’t changed.
We're adding the meter readings’ breakdown to invoices in stages, so it may not be available for you yet. If it isn't, and you’d like to understand your meter readings better, reach out to us and we’ll provide it to you.
What the breakdown on your invoice shows
A half-hourly meter produces 48 readings a day. The percentages on your invoice show how many of that billing period's readings came from each source. They count the share of readings - not the share of kWh or pounds on your bill.
Being billed on estimates
Where readings are missing on your billing day, we bill based on industry or internal estimates data rather than billing you nothing for the missing periods and catching up later.
Half-hourly readings keep arriving after a bill has gone out. When the missing readings arrive, we recalculate that billing period on the actual readings and correct the original bill with a credit note or an adjustment. There’s nothing for you to do.
Why a reading can go missing
Your meter is maintained by a meter operator (MOP) and read by a data collector (DC). A reading can go missing when:
the meter has a physical fault
there is a temporary communications problem
the meter sits somewhere with poor signal
the reading isn't passed down the chain to us
We don't read these meters ourselves. When data stops arriving we raise it with the meter operator or data collector responsible and press for a fix. There’s nothing you need to do on your end.