On 22/08/2016 10:31, Clive Page wrote:
There has been a news story this weekend about EON overcharging a number
of customers because their gas meters measured cubic metres when they
should have measured cubic feet, or maybe vice-versa. These stories are
all confused and hard to believe, especially because the ratio of these
units is around 35.3:1, and anyone who had a bill to small or too large
by a factor of 35 would surely notice. Does anyone understand what
actually went on here - the newspaper and website reports don't help at
all, and no reporter seems clued up enough to investigate or explain.

You are missing a bit of information. Meters which use cubic feet
display consumption in units of 100 cu ft. So a mistake between metric
and imperial is a ratio of 2.83.

I can check easily enough whether my gas meter is recording cubic feet
or metres and corresponds to what is on the bill, but is there any easy
way for the consumer to check that a gas meter is actually recording
roughly the right number of cubit feet/metres? With an electricity
meter it's not too hard: turn everything off but one appliance such as a
1kW heater, then run it for a set length of time. But checking a gas
meter seems very difficult for the end user.

Well, for a rough value of roughly, the rating of your boiler or gas
cooker in kW lets you do much the same with gas as you can do with
electricity.


--
Robin
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