How do prepayment meters work?
Instead of receiving bills based on your energy usage, you pay for your energy before using it, by pre-loading energy credit onto your meter. You're given a top-up key for electricity, and top-up card for gas, which are loaded with information about your property and energy plan. There are local payment points all over the UK, generally in corner shops and off-licences, where you can buy credit to load onto your key and card to top up your meter.
Advantages:
- Prepayment meters allow you a lot of control over your energy payments. You can closely monitor how much you're paying for energy, and how much you're using, so you can make sure you never build up debt.
Disadvantages:
- As traditional prepayment meters cost more to maintain, your energy rates will likely be higher than on a credit meter.
- If you run out of credit, you can go off supply. There are “friendly credit hours” (generally evenings, overnight, and over the weekends) when your supply will never go off. But outside of these times, if you forget to top up, your home energy will be disconnected.
We'll send you information about how to operate your prepayment meter when we install it. To top up, take you card and/or key to your nearest Paypoint, Allpay or Payzone in most corner shops and ask to top up your card.
Once you have paid, just take the card/key home, insert it into the meter and leave for one minute for the new credit to transfer across.
If you think your meter or card/key is broken, please get in touch and we'll be able to help.