This morning I finally got round to ringing up British Gas and chasing up the revised electricity bill they said they'd send within ten days of 13th April, after agreeing with me that my day and night meter readings had been switched around and therefore I didn't owe them £1500 as they had previously claimed.

It turns out that their specialist team has reversed its verdict, and just didn't bother actually telling me or anything. They have reverted to the opinion that the two meter readings are the right way round. I told them my meter had the words ‘low’ and ‘normal’ written on it, and they told me those are simply misleading and do not refer to the low night-time rate and the normal day-time rate as one might expect. They insist that the night rate is the one marked ‘normal’, which means that the expensive day rate is the one which has been rocketing skywards at high speed.

If this is accurate – and while on the one hand I find it easy to believe British Gas is talking twaddle, on the other I would also find it easy to believe that someone had connected up my meter back to front – then I may actually owe them £1500 after all. If this turns out to be the case, then I suspect it might be because my night storage heaters have also got the wrong idea about which half of a 24-hour period is which, and are helpfully doing all their heating in the daytime rather than at night. Annoyingly, the heaters don't have a clock or any kind of timing control on them, and neither do they have obvious lights to indicate when they're on, so it's rather hard to check this. I can only assume that they get some magic information transmitted down the mains line itself to tell them when the low rate begins and ends – in which case, perhaps a side effect of my meter swapping the rates round might be that it also misinforms the heaters? I know very little about this kind of technology, so I'm not sure what's a plausible explanation and what's not. (And it doesn't help that the heaters are currently off; if British Gas had phoned me back promptly then I could have done some tests in April, when it was still cold enough that I had the heating on anyway.)

It's all terribly confusing and not a little annoying. In the immediate short term I'm going to take meter readings twice a day to see which reading really moves during the day and which moves at night; after that I suppose it's going to end up being a complicated N-way faff between me, British Gas, the landlord, whoever installed the meter and so on. In the absolute worst case I do actually have £1500 I could blow on a backlogged electricity bill, but I'd really rather not if it can possibly be proved to be somebody else's responsibility.

Bah and grr. Perhaps I shouldn't have done this early in the morning; there's nothing like a blazing row before 9am to put a downer on your entire day :-/