Martin Lewis warns British Gas, OVO, EDF, EON, Octopus customers 'in the coming days'

BBC Sounds podcast host is urging customers to take action amid 'Meter Reading Week', as the new Ofgem price cap - taking bills to £1717 - kicks in.

Martin Lewis is urging people to be proactive in order to assure they get a fair energy bill at the end of the month. The BBC Sounds podcast host is urging customers to take action amid 'Meter Reading Week', as the new Ofgem price cap - taking bills to £1717 - kicks in.

The ITV regular said: “Reminder that it’s Meter Reading Week. It used to be Meter Reading Day but I managed to crash most of the big energy firms by doing so.” Mr Lewis continued: “Now I say it’s Meter Reading Week because it really doesn’t make much difference.

"If you don’t do a metre reading and you pay by monthly direct debit your usage is estimated and it’s your energy firm that using an algorithm will decide how much was before the price went up and how much was after.

READ MORE UK faces 66 hours of snow with three places 'worst hit' by flurries

“If it estimates too much after the price went up, you will pay more. I’m not suggesting that they’re trying to diddle by doing that, more you might just fall foul of the algorithm. You might also gain from it. The way to make it totally fair is to give a metre reading within a few days on either side of the 1st of October.”

Martin continued: “Most firms you can do it a day or two before and a couple of days afterwards and backdate the metre reading as long as it’s an honest one. If you’ve got a working smart metre, working being the operative word, you don’t need to do this because your smart metre is sending in metre readings anyway.”

He explained: “In that very specific case, it’s the act of topping up that tells the metre what you should be paying. If you top up before the 1st of October your metre will be told the current rates and it will not be told the new rates until you top up again so the longer you can run not topping up on or after the 1st of October, the longer you will usually stay on the lower rate.”