I think I’m paying off a debt on my meter – what’s happened?

There are several possible reasons why there might be debt on your meter. Read on to see whether any of them apply to you.


The amount you’ve been topping up isn’t enough to cover both your energy use and your daily standing charge.


You may not have realised that we take a daily standing charge on some tariffs from the credit in your meter. If you hadn’t topped up in a while the standing charge may have built up on the meter.

If you’re not sure how much the standing charge is, please give us a call, or check your welcome letter or email. You can also see the amount of your standing charge on the screens on your meter – just scroll through the screens until you get to screen F or 4 on your electricity meter or screen 17 on your gas meter. For more info see our handy guides for electricity and gas meters.

We suggest you keep an eye on how much you spend each week (especially when the weather gets colder) so you know how much to top up without going into your emergency credit.

You’ve been using your emergency credit and your standing charges have built up.

When you’re using your emergency credit, the meter doesn’t take your daily standing charge, so it builds up as debt until you next top up and are back in credit. When you top up after you’ve used your emergency credit, you have to repay the full amount you’ve used plus little extra to stay in the positive credit.

You’ve recently moved into a new property and the debt was already on the meter when you moved in.


The debt could have been loaded onto the previous tenant’s meter by us or another supplier because that tenant owed money, or it could be because the property was empty for a while before you moved in. If so, standing charges may have been building up as a debt on the meter. Give us a call so we can go through the meter screens with you to find out what kind of debt it is. That will tell us exactly how to wipe it off, so we can refund you for anything you’ve already paid towards it. We might ask you to send us your tenancy agreement before we can wipe off the debt.


You’ve run up a debt with your previous energy supplier, and they installed prepayment meters to help you repay the debt.

If so, please give us a call to tell us how much you owe (it would also really help us if you could send us photos of the meter screens). You don’t owe this money to Economy Energy, so we’ll need to wipe the debt off your meter, to stop it making extra debt repayments whenever you top up. You’ll also need to get in touch with your previous supplier to arrange to pay off the debt to them.