Tim Small
Octopus Energy posted me a 321 A4 page electricity bill printed out on paper as a physical 5cm thick package (on their "Agile tariff" the rate changes every half hour, so there are 48 line items per day). I enquired as to why they'd done that?
Apparently they tried to email it first, but the 15 MB email exceeded my email server's size limit, so they posted a hard copy instead.
May 15 at 5:07pmWeb
Show threadEarth NotesMay 15
@tim Goodness! I used to get paper itemised phone bills like that way back when, when I was running UUCP / dial-up service and had most of the street's phone lines coming to may house. (The residue of that cable co is within Virgin Media or Liberty or whatever it is now...)
Show threadDave SmithMay 15
@EarthOrgUK @tim I used to work for a company that wrote telecoms billing software, and there was one customer of a provider who would get a 90kg bill every month.
Show threadUkeleleEricMay 15
@tim you couldn't make it up. Octopus seems to be a bit erratic with billing. We have been with them for some years now. Every now and again, they forget to bill us (or credit us) for one of the three things they should (Gas usage, Electric usage and Electric export). Last bill time (the 19th), the gas and Export were fine. Until after the end of the month, there was a statement saying that some items were being manually reviewed, so I expected the Electric bill to appear eventually. 1/2
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialMay 16
@UkeleleEric @tim they messed up my billing enrolment and didn't charge me for over a year (I didn't notice, as far as I knew it was going out), then demanded several thousand in back payments all in one go. I eventually got them to strike off a lot of the debt because it was their fault, but it took me another 14 months to pay it off and the financial impact has sucked.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧May 16

@gsuberland @UkeleleEric @tim oh, me too! then they messed it up *again* and tried to charge twice the amount they should have

fucking garbage company. does anyone know an energy provider that isn't?

Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialMay 16
@whitequark @UkeleleEric @tim idk tbh. the weird thing about Octopus is that they're basically the only energy company that's actually transparent and communicative about their pricing changes, and doesn't seem to be run by old oil barron types, but at the same time their backend metering and billing tech is an absolute shambles despite outwardly looking way more modern and polished than the competition.
Show threadUkeleleEricMay 15
@tim But a random nearly £50 credit for electric dating back to September 2022 (!) was there! When our next Gas and Export come through, what's the betting they will still forget our electric usage, and I will have to remind them (in the meantime, our balance looks better, so I'm not worried).
Show threadJohnMay 16

@UkeleleEric
@tim

I had this when I had to keep asking them for a bill each month and the trick is, is you put them in a position where they'd have to hand you something known as a lock letter, which they will not want to do. as then you can complain to ofgem

So the question to ask them is," what do you have to do in order so that I don't have to ask you again?"

also just bypass ocotpus' support on email and email greg@octopus.energy and you'll be escalated to the top tier support.

Show threadPaul SuttonMay 15

@tim Is it any wonder this country is so messed up

1. Why not make it a HTML page on a website
2. Why not make it downloadable, usually pdf or erk DocX Ideally include odf
3. Send e-mail linking to said document

Show threadMartiniusMay 15
@zleap @tim I think it should also be possible to get the pdf size below 15MB. Isnt it mostly black and white text?
Show threadTim SmallMay 15
@Martinius @zleap@qoto.org I ran it through ghostscript, and that shaved 34% off (no change in quality). That is still apparently slightly too large for my mail relay (after mime base64 encoding) but after the radical innovation of splitting it into two PDFs, I successfully sent it to myself in two emails (from a different email account hosted elsewhere).
Octopus make all of my historic bills available to download via an AWS URL, so I suspect they are paying 34% too much on their S3 bill.
Show threadTim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPEMay 15
@zleap @tim There is an API. There's probably a law/regulation saying that they have to pro-actively send you bills rather than leave it up to the customer to query the API.
Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷May 15
@TimWardCam @zleap @tim
They’d probably be legal if they sent a one-page summary bill with a link to the detail.
Show threadTim SmallMay 15
@TimWardCam @zleap@qoto.org Yep, I presume it's something like this however there's probably no law/rule which prevents them splitting the pdf in half and sending the bill as two separate emails, and there's certainly nothing to prevent them optimising the PDF so that it is 34% smaller (with no change in quality) - both of which I managed in 2 minutes (using ghostscript, including time to look up the necessary gs options).
Show threadGary Parker May 15
@tim @bert_hubert
Show thread`Da ElfMay 15
@tim Must ... Control ... Fist of Death™.
Show threadMarkNMay 15

@tim The mail must get through!

LoL

Show threadGrant StephensMay 15
@tim haha, had the same thing happen to me when the email bounced. They also couldnt tell me what it'd bounced.
Show threadKevin RussellMay 15

@tim

Wow, dumb answer.

We don't know how to administer a company, is truer, but you wouldnt to be recorded saying it.

Show threadBruno GirinMay 16
@tim if it's for 1 month, that's 10 pages per day, 5 line items per page. Maybe they can optimise their bill format?
Show threadTim SmallMay 16
@brunogirin For some reason the bill covers the electricity consumption from 21st June 2024 to 4th May 2025. One day per page. They had been crediting me for solar generation and charging for gas consumption, but not billing anything for electricity consumption.
Show threadArielMay 16
@tim (slow clap)
Show threadDragonMay 16
@tim I suppose linking to a download in the "my account" area of their website would have been too sensible?
Show threadNicolas SAPA May 16
AMEX have the same fallback if their email bounce.
You also get a letter telling you what happened and that they will still try to send you an email before sending you a physical mail.
Show threadHelix May 17
@tim
How much does it weigh?
Show threadSteve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺May 18
@tim been there, done that. Although in my case it was because their mail server was sending malformed mails which mine rejected. I pointed out that I could just download the bill from their website, but they said that legally they had to send one so it carried on for a year. I'm sure legally they don't need to send anything *that* detailed - a summary and a pointer to their website for more detail would surely be fine?