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I have that with British Gas, my DD’s are always going up even though I’m in credit, and as you say the fluctuation between summer and winter, are quite high and now I’ve got a smart meter they should know my usage on a day to day, week to week basis and so should be able to amend my DD accordingly.
cornelius_blackfoot-
The whole business plan of these companies are based on a few things:-
a) Charging the same DD over the entire year so that the majority of customers can budget accordingly. (Most customers wouldn't like being billed for actual usage, i.e. £20 in summer months and then £100+ in the winter months.) They give discounts for payment via DD to incentivise this.
b) Since charging the same DD over the entire year means someone has to be in credit and someone in debit at various points over the year, the companies want to make sure it's not them owing money, since that costs them money.
(Even though if all customers were equally distributed over the year in terms of break even point then, as a company, there wouldn't be meaningfully out of pocket or massively in credit at any point during the year. It would be a lottery for individual customers though.)
c) To minimise owing customers money, if there's a chance, based on a customers current DD and balance, that the customer may go into debit during the winter months then the company will look to avoid this by increasing the DD to claw some of that back, and then eventually reducing the DD once enough of a credit is built up that the customer will not go into debit at any point during year.
So, vaguely shitty practices but you can see why they do it.
MSE has a section on the rules about how they should set fair DD values and also give you money back if you've built up a significant surplus:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/lower-energy-direct-debits/
(Scroll down to Step 2: Ask for your money back)
A smart meter doesn't affect any of this really as nothing can predict your future usage accurately.
Greenbank
Did that once, and they just hassled me to change it again, and then they just changed it automatically.
I know what the problem is, they have a simple calc that checks DD vs usage, but mine varies so much between Summer and Winter, that you need to look at how much I'm paying over 1 year rather than just the last 2 or 3 months. Their shit algorithm predicts that I'll go into debit, but doesn't acknowledge over the year it evens out.
Nobody there is helpful at all.