ESB refusing to bill us.

Not sure if this is the right forum.

We moved into a second hand property 10 weeks ago, it was a derelict property that a developer had renovated.

When we moved in I contacted ESB with regards to transferring the ESB account into our names. I gave them the address of the property, previous owners current address and the meter number, 10 weeks later and numerous phone calls to ESB and they are refusing to acknowledge that they are supplying the property as they do not recognise the meter number. Today I rang the previous owner and he told me that he had the exact same difficulties , when he was renovating the property ESB came out and erected a new ESB pole and line and a new meter box, and then never billed him. He said he gave up contacting them after 3 months. The ESB supply was connected to the property 18 months ago and he was never billed for it.

I contacted them again today and told them that there is an ESB supply to the property, that the previous owner has not been billed for 18 months supply and that I wanted it resolved as I certainly was not paying an 18 month bill. ESB response " Sorry we have no record of an ESB supply to that property, try Airtricity."

So what would you do.. , say ye Happy days free Electricity??

Presumably if you have a power cut and they don't recognise your meter/household you will have difficulty getting it fixed, perhaps you could get them to come and 'connect' you to the grid and have their engineer sort out the meter/account reference.

yeah your right in the event of a power cut, we may have difficulty getting reconnected.

perhaps you could get them to come and 'connect' you to the grid and have their engineer sort out the meter/account reference

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. ye being trying to this for weeks.. they wont send anyone to the property as according to them we're not ESB customers.

Molly said:

. ye being trying to this for weeks.. they wont send anyone to the property as according to them we're not ESB customers.

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Maybe at least get this bit in writing from them in the interim. Then the can't come back to you looking for arrears (and presumably the arrears of the previous owner as well).

Once you have that, just get set up with them, however they want to do it, and then start afresh with a clean slate.

I'd note the reading from when you moved in, in case of future difficulties when the ESB - of whomever - eventually look for paying.
After that you've tried everything reasonable, just note all you efforts to cover your asss

This wouldn't be on an Island off the Kerry coast, with a wind generator by any chance?http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/14/db1401.xml:)

I had similar problems with Eircon when we moved to our new (business) premises about 6 months ago. Despite supplying them with a dozen phone numbers of the previous tenants & their name, the 'office' didn't exist. The problems didn't stop there...

I now know that, with Eircon, the only option is to ring their general customer service line, wait 10 days, and then invoke their formal complaint mechanism. LOL, your 'unique' complaint number (as per their policy) is your telephone account number. It's like 'we will ignore you until you get so p**sed off that your formally complain'. It's the only way to get things sorted with them.

Maybe the ESB have a similar formal complaint policy (...attitude to customer service)?

calculate how much you owe and put it into a seperate bank account. when they eventually do come around to billing you produce the earlier correspondence showing how you tried to pay etc and see if you can a reduction on the bill. then use the funds you have set aside. tempting to use such money for other uses of course and the hardest part will be trying to ignore its there.