Symbio Energy 

I owe less than £5.00, but keep receiving bills in excess of £200. I spoke to customer services today, who questioned why I haven’t got a DD set up! I am refusing to pay anything until I receive a correct bill.

Even though Symbio has ceased trading, they are still making up statements. Recently they gave me three credits on account as they had stated I’d been over charged.
Having regularly submitted meter readings, and having agreed a fixed rate, the ‘credit on account’ has somewhat been spirited away. For example, my September meter readings meant my bill should have been £25.89, but Symbio decided to take £172.28 from my credit balance. They are still using estimated and grossly inflated meter readings to reach these ridiculous amounts even though I always submit readings.
As I have stated before, I live in a small flat and I was away for most of September.
I sincerely hope that that whoever is appointed to take over is not as hopeless as Symbio Energy, because if they are it will not be tolerated.

Having won the ombudsman case and been supposedly given £100 compensation (Ive not seen it yet), Symbio said I could leave them. They faked the final readings and claimed I used 6 years worth of electric in just 2 weeks. I complained, they gave a complaint ref number, but as we all know they never follow up, so now they are going under instead of paying me the £163 they owe they are trying to steal £650 - disgusting behaviour.

I note all the symbio employees.. ex employees now, putting up rave reviews and ranting at everyone else.

Let's be honest. Yes their kwh rates and standing rates were cheap. Infact the cheapest.

However what these fake 5 star reviewers are forgetting is this... Its fine having low pricing, but when you over estimate your customers usage by 1000s of kwhs and give you them a direct debit of epic proportions (based on some pie in the sky formula) 13p per kwh suddenly means nothing. In real terms you end up paying a bomb.

These people owe me hundreds.

I have a smart reader fitted by some idiot that never worked and probably never will

The website is the worst I have ever used.

They were mugging everyone off. They owe thousands.

Symbio have overestimated my actual annual usage by 55% & want to be paid for over 2,300 kwh that they haven't supplied & I haven't used & are using this to object to me switching elsewhere.
emails to them bounce back.
Their prices were ultra competitive but customer 'service' rubbish.
Ceasing trading will prevent others having to deal with them.

STOP PRESS - they've just sent me a CORRECT bill, so I've upped my rating from 1 to 4.

Shame I was on 13p per kw. Neonreef.co.uk have 17p kw may change to them.

Finally I don't need to worry they will send me some over estimated final bill 10 months after I managed to switch away from them. Never received any, I was with them for about a month and they charged me £30 for that.
For me economy 7 accounts that count. At the moment my fix account until Jun 2023 is:
Electricity day unit rate: 21.53p per kWh
Electricity night unit rate: 9.33p per kWh
Daily standing charge: 24.20p per day
I use average yearly 1500kwh daily and 6500kwh at night (storage heaters, hot water cylinder, dehumidifier)
Symbio wasn't cheaper on night tariff so for me they weren't the cheapest electricity provider at all.
Good old Yorkshire energy beat them before until they went bust almost a year ago. I was lucky Symbio messed up my switch over and Scottish Power stole my account from them :)
It was very easy to switch away from Scottish Power. Within 4 months I was with 4 different providers, hopefully the current one will last for the next almost 2 years with these rates. :)

Symbio went bust before shut down, fantastic news!!

Contact your Bank and use the Direct Debit Guarantee scheme for what can only be described as theft & reclaim all DD’s that your account is in credit for.

You will get back as you are protected but this is the quickest route by far 👍🏽👍🏽

I have been trying to switch from Symbio since June all went through and my new supplier took over on the 19th. Symbio were massively overestimating my usage when last year the estimates were not too far off my actual usage. When I realised they had been overestimating so much I thought either they are in trouble and trying to keep hold of as much customers money as they can or they are just incompetent either way I wasn’t happy to have them holding onto £100 of my money so I cancelled my direct debit in June when they estimated I would use £150 of electricity (June 2020 my bill was £30) that was more than double what I used in March but because I cancelled the direct debit they blocked me from switching. I finally got them to produce a bill for my actual usage for June it was £0.01 due to their over estimate in May but along with it was their estimate for my July usage which was again £150 I had given up emailing them by this point and managed to get through on the phone to the 1 member of staff they had with any amount of common sense. I told him there was no was the bill was right and he agreed told me not to pay and that a new bill would be issued in August. A week into August no sign of a bill so called them up they said due to moving to a new system they would not be issuing a bill for August at which point I decided to pay the over estimated July bill I figured it was probably about 3 months worth of usage so would be a little more than I should pay but if that’s what it took to get the switch to go through it was worthwhile paying and thankfully the switch went through. At this point I’m not sure if they owe me money or I owe them but I’m glad I stopped paying them when I did or they would have had a lot more of my money.

Symbio Energy placed in administration today.
This is what to do:-
1. Cancel any direct debit authorisation with immediate effect.
2. Take a photo of your meter reading and provide the reading to the administrator / liquidator ASAP
3. Check any invoice prepared by the OFGEM appointed "supplier of last resort" to make sure they have applied the correct tariff up to this date.
3. If you are due a refund then prepare for a potential Ombudsman Services case to see your money - keep all email records and follow up all phone calls by email. It'll probably be a while before you'll be seeing that refund.
4. Try not to swear - the person dealing with your case has 10,000 other annoyed customers and is just doing a thankless job.

Whether you like them or loathe them it is always a pain when your supplier goes bust. Good luck to all affected

Gone bust today stop your DD
By the way Ofgem are not much better
Hopeless

Jobs for the boys

UPDATE: Adding the final readings on my old meter to the readings at the end of September on my new smart meter, then comparing with the Symbio invoices, they have over-charged me by £468. No excuse for that when a smart meter sends them the readings directly! Not to mention the further £234 they were trying to collect on 1 October which I managed to stop.

ALSO: I just remembered I paid a two months advance deposit at the beginning. So that's another £228 they owe me. Please check your records to see if you paid an advance deposit too. I hope Eon will be refunding this, as well as the over-charge.

I got an email from Symbio yesterday saying they were going to take £234 by direct debit on 1 October. I checked my account and they took £277 on 14 September. So £511 in two weeks... I had a new smart meter installed five weeks ago and it says the bill over that period is £105. So they are over-charging massively. I checked the portal, but they have stopped issuing itemised bills! They just show a "monthly consumption" figure which is vastly inflated. I see they have gone bust today. I have cancelled my direct debit and recommend that all Symbio customers do the same.

As of September 29th 16.25 hrs they have ceased trading - so glad that I stopped my DD two months ago. Those who haven't will still get their money back- good luck peeps.

Symbio have gone bust ! Check on Ofgem website as cannot post links on here . Stop your Direct Debits today with your Bank as Symbio will already have instigated them . If you do not stop today you may be Debited on 01/10/2021!

I was a customer of Symbio and they suddenly decided that I needed to pay £376 a month instead of the £256 that was agreed. Eventually I tried to switch and they blocked my account they finally unblocked it but are trying to charge me £801 for a final payment totally ignoring the meter reading I supplied with photos. Their estimated reading ignoring my meter readings entirely are £980 OVER my final reading. They keep ringing me and today tried to tell me that my new company Shell had agreed with their estimated readings which is a total lie as I am in touch with Shell trying to sort this out. It is a TOTAL NIGHTMARE.

Finally Symbio Energy has gone bust! It give me no pleasure but I believe a great deal of their problems were self inflicted.

Great news. Symbio have gone bust. That'll save any new customers being ripped off. Best news I've heard all day.

They have gone bust!

According to their website, they have ceased trading and advice is available to customers on the Ofgem website.

Moved into somewhere that Symbio is the electricity supplier, been unable to switch and can never get through on the phone. Their customer service is poor I can’t even begin to imagine when they are like as a chosen supplier. No response on email, do not waste your time and money!

I vacated my property 4 weeks ago and am having a nightmare trying to get a final bill produced, despite having been in contact and notified them in advance several weeks before moving out as per their policy. They do not reply to emails, despite being able to find them quick enough on the rare occasions you actually manage to get through to talk to someone on the phone and give them the account number to search for.

Unfortunately, staff seem to be based abroad and do not understand very basic things you try to explain to them. Every time I try to get the final bill produced and my credit balance refunded back to me, they tell me they can't do it and seem to misunderstand that I have sold the property and am not renting it out.

It is poor practice to employ call centres where staff are not fully trained to understand the basics and cannot communicate effectively with customers - and the last agent I spoke to was exceptionally rude, kept talking over me as I was trying to explain things and using a condescending tone as if I was an idiot despite being completely wrong about what they were saying.

It is utterly frustrating to have a company deliberately hold on to your money when you are no longer their customer. A total abuse of trust and position. I am pursuing the matter through Resolver and intend to take it to Ofgem if it is not resolved swiftly.