Ovo has billed me £33,000 for a month of energy use in a two bed flat

My problem is with Ovo Energy. I used to be with SSE which was great – I would provide gas and electricity meter readings every few months, send me a bill and withdraw the money from my bank account.

But when Ovo took over SSE, it insisted that I start paying a monthly direct debit and it would set the figure.

I wanted to change suppliers. But before I could do that, Ovo emailed me in December 2022 saying I owed him £32,975.25. Yes you’ve read correctly.

I own a two bedroom apartment which is vacant most of the time as I am abroad a lot. My daughter stayed there for a while while looking for a job in London but she kept her electricity consumption to a minimum.

We normally pay around £150 a month for gas and electricity so it would take us 18 years to come up with a £32,975 bill.

Accepted as read: Estimated meter readings have resulted in an energy bill of £33,000 for our reader – and despite the clear error, the huge debt still shows up in his account

I think it might be because my counter only has four digits and not the usual five. Ovo’s last estimated value was above the 9999 mark and into the 10,000 range. At that point, my counter would go back to 0000.

After this estimate was made, but before I knew it, I submitted a manual reading of 9882, which was lower than Ovo’s estimate of 10105. I believe Ovo’s estimate was read as 0105, and this led the Ovo system to believe that I would have gone from there to my meter reading of 9882 in a few days.

I thought it would be easy to sort this out once Ovo saw the apparent error but I can’t get through on the phone and when I messaged someone via the Facebook page they said it was an SSE error and the correction could take three months.

The £30,000 debt is still in my account. While I know it’s a mistake, it’s so easy that a simple computer glitch will lead to a court case and the bailiffs step in, ruining my credit forever.

This almost happened to me years ago when the council made a mistake calculating my council tax, so you can understand why I’m stressed. SL, London.

Helen Crane of This is Money responds: Energy company, back at it. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t have an email from a reader telling me that gas or electricity was billed incorrectly, and I still don’t understand why companies have such a hard time getting it just right.

Ovo’s mistake in your case may seem silly or even slightly amusing at first. It’s obviously utterly lunatic that you were being billed £33,000 for a month of gas and electricity in your modest flat – even more so when you consider no one has lived there for quite some time.

But I suspect a lot of people would see things a little differently if they logged into their energy account every day and still saw that damn big sum with a minus sign in front of it.

You’re also right when you say that it’s all too easy to turn a silly mistake into a letter or a visit to a collection agency, and I’ve heard from readers who have experienced just that.

You told me that it was even more frustrating to see your energy bills calculated in such a completely wrong way because, like many others, you made a real effort to reduce your consumption.

While you say you didn’t follow Ovo boss Stephen Fitzpatrick’s earlier suggestion to cuddle pets and star jump, you turned off your central heating and swapped the gas oven for the microwave when energy prices skyrocketed.

Mistakes happen. However, this should have been easy to correct as Ovo had all the necessary information about your ownership and previous usage.

Energy bills are high at the moment but I don’t think it would be possible to make £33k in a month in a two bed flat unless you were doing something highly illegal.

But it was far from an easy fix as you couldn’t reach Ovo by phone and had some frustrating experiences trying to work things out via online messages.

Whoever you spoke to was simply told that the correction would take three months and not much more.

You think the problem was with your energy meter. It’s an older model with no digital display – and unlike most old gauges, it only has four digits, not five.

Your theory that makes sense to me was that Ovo’s previous estimated meter reading was therefore recorded on his computer system as 0105 and not 10105 – meaning that when you later recorded your actual meter reading of 9886 a few days later, it was calculated as a huge amount of energy consumption .

You think the energy company decided you went from 0105 to 9886 on the meter.

From what you’ve told me, the numbers seemed to add up to be a possible explanation.

Facebook frustration: SL reached out to Ovo’s Facebook page to try and resolve the issue, but was simply told to wait up to three months

But Ovo told me your meter wasn’t really the problem. She insisted you received that huge bill because the “industry-agreed” gas meter reading taken when your account was transferred from SSE was completely wrong.

It said it had had a dispute with the relevant parties about it, but didn’t say when.

However, a few days after I contacted Ovo, that three-month wait seemed to shrink pretty quickly.

Ovo said the dispute is “now settled”, meaning the reading has been corrected and your account between SSE and Ovo is now fully settled.

Instead of being £33,000 in debt, you now have £27 in credit – and Ovo has also paid you £100 as a goodwill gesture.

It also reassured me and you that when your counter finally crosses the 9999 mark and goes back to zero, this won’t happen again.

Here is to hope.