I was paying upwards of $150 a month for heating in a tiny <400sqft studio in Boston at one point. $200 on one month. There was definitely something wrong with the meter readings, and pretty sure I was getting charged for someone else's electricity considering how little I was at home with the heater on. The utility company refused to investigate and would only threaten to send in debt collectors if I didn't pay up. My property manager only pointed me to the utility company. I tried complaining to DPU, but they didn't respond to e-mails, and I didn't have time for phone calls or mediating this mess, in general.
As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/
Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.
OK, first I never expect to read "Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill.." :-)
That said, it is very hard to argue with the power company. As the article points out you can have the meter sent to a special testing lab but if it works, well it you are out of luck. About 10 years ago a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains got a bill that was out of whack (and he was a EE) and the power company would not be budged, so he pulled his meter out of the socket for a month[1] (don't try this at home!) and still got billed for a bunch of power use. It turned out that someone had 'tapped' the power wires leading up to his house, and PG&E wasn't bothering to read his house meter, just looking at how much their transformer sent to the 'only' house up there. Whoops.
One of the things I suspected, and then later proved, was that my 1st generation SunnyBoy inverters from SMA on my Solar system confused the smart meter when they installed it. It would not accurately read the power generated by the panels so was under reporting power generated. That got "fixed" when one of the inverters failed (unrelated, it was over 10 years old) and we replaced two 2500W inverters with a single 5500W inverter. The modern inverter and smart meter get along fine.
[1] Since he lives in the mountains and outages were not infrequent he had a whole house generator powered by propane that he could use.
I'm curious as to the details of your friend's story.
Maybe they do it differently in CA than FL, but I have never seen any device that measures "how much their transformer" sends installed in any normal situation.
A more reasonable explanation would be that they were using "estimated" billing -- billing that is based on a few spot checks of the meter reading, but not a check every month. This is common in places that the electrical meter is not easily accessible, such as behind a gate or being guarded by a dog(or out in the mountains). In this case they would have extrapolated previous months to produce an estimated usage and billed on that.
I have had direct experience with a local power company billing for a "demand"[1] rate that exceeded by >300% the actual capability of the transformer and wires to supply. If that amount had actually been consumed, the wires would have caught fire and/or the transformer would have failed, possibly spectacularly. After I pointed this out to them, they quietly refunded the amount without an explanation and assured me there were no other errors of this type.
I can only relate it as I heard it. I expect that by now the properties have wireless smart meters and actually reading the meter is no longer an issue.
3. Get hit by a massive bill when moving to another property.
In Norway, they do the same - you are supposed to report your actual usage, but if you don't or they believe you've gamed the numbers, they just guesstimate based on the average consumption in the area, past consumption in your home, phase of the moon, whatever.
However, when you move, both you and the new owner/renter need to read off the meter and sign a form, after which the balance is settled.
Years ago, I had a massive refund - ever the workaholic, I traveled 230+ days a year and, unsurprisingly, consumed much less electricity than the previous tenant.
The utility company refused to believe the numbers I reported (which, in fairness, I didn't report too often, as I was most often abroad during the reporting window (typically a couple of days either side of a billing period change))
After a few years, I asked them to send a representative to have a look at my meter; they refused, claiming that they had other, more important matters to attend to.
End result: When I moved after seven years, I got a refund of more than US$6,000. I had a couple of extra beers that evening.
I warned the incoming tenant that he really, really wanted to report his usage - if they guesstimated consumption based on my numbers, he'd be in for a nasty surprise when leaving the property...
My provider here allows me to report my usage with either their mobile app or website. If I forget to do it, they charge me based on some average like the one you describe. It works quite well on the whole, and seems both fair and efficient.
I had a place in the UK where the meter was connected incorrectly.
It had "Economy 7" tariff, which was supposed to mean 7 hours of cheaper electricity at night. In fact, we had the cheap rate in the day, and the expensive rate at night.
The online system never accepted my readings, and a guy would come round. One of them showed me how the meter was wrong, but didn't want to report it -- I don't think he was paid enough to care.
Maybe they do it differently in CA than FL, but I have never seen any device that measures "how much their transformer" sends installed in any normal situation.
Indeed. I don't think that gets measured anywhere, other than in a general "this areas utilises "x" Mwh, so on average, section "y" would use "z"
Shortly after I moved to the Bay in 2007, we were excited to get out the lights and decorate the house for Xmas. Our bill was $1,200 that month. We had a lot of lights, but usually ran them in Oklahoma, where electricity is much, much cheaper. No tiered pricing either.
A watt is about a buck a year, so 12 months/year times 1200/month is about 14.4 kilowatts, thats over 120 amps average load, or maybe 240 amps worth of blinkie lights. I find that unlikely to be christmas lights.
It looks like you're using national average electricity pricing of about 10 cents per kwh. In California there's a tiered pricing schedule; the more you use the more it costs -- up to a max of around 500% in Jan 2007.
With this in mind his load is closer to 24A. Seems entirely reasonable for 2007 with incandescent strings. I remember tripping 20A breakers with incandescent lights and having to run lines from different circuits in my childhood.
Yup, incandescent strings, reindeer, bush blankets, you name it. It looked like Xmas threw up on our house. I've tripped breakers before.
I would also note our bill at that house ran $400-500 when "normally cold", which I should have mentioned in my post and which only occurs here a few months of the year. Still, we were shocked and it was a lot of lights!
Grow lights and decorated the house with "greenery" for christmas? Sorry, read news too often about pot plantations and their high electricity consumption...
I believe https://getservice.com is the "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" you're looking for, taking a 30% cut of recovered money. I haven't personally used them, though.
1 - shut down the incoming circuit breaker, see if the meter "stops spinning" (today it's a light that blinks). If it doesn't, call the electrical company
2 - Get the (heater power) x (time it stays on IN HOURS) = your consumption. Heating and electric showers usually make up the bulk of your consumption (unless you're into home baking or bitcoin mining but even then). Calculate that, see if it matcher what you're paying
3 - Weather proof your place. Find places where cold air seeps through, seal them. Keep doors and windows closed when using aircon.
- ensure the company is recording it as a complaint officially
- request that the company provides their "final response"
- contact the Financial Ombudsman Service
Normally mentioning the FOS is enough for all issues to be magically resolved by the supplier instantly, but if not, the FOS a will sort it out for you - free of charge.
The reason companies "shit the bed" about FOS stuff is because they get charged a flat ~£600 if the FOS receives a valid complaint about them, regardless of merit. This is in addition to the compensation they pay you.
This is true, make sure you say the words, 'I want this recorded as an official complaint', and ask for confirmation. All regulated industries will go the extra mile for this. I was once in a call centre were they had special complaint handlers for people who said the above words, so they could resolve it before the ombudsman hears!
If you live in the SF Bay Area and you have PGE, you can opt out of a smart meter and go back to analog. The catch is that you have to pay $75 up front and $360 over 3 years; still worth it.
I got charged $600 for two months in Toronto during a cold winter a while back and calling Toronto Hydro got it reduced to the actual $300 it was supposed to be. So FWIW in my situation at least it was worth the effort to look into it.
I was in an older (1980s) apartment building so I couldn't blame a singular meter, I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
I've heard that elsewhere in Ontario, Canada and in Toronto (two different companies) that overcharging is a big recurring issue. I wasn't given a good explanation about my one anecdotal case outside of an 'accounting error'. I just knew that it sounded far too high to be normal.
> I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
In most jurisdictions, your electricity must be metered separately if you are billed by the utility company. In my building, there is a room with a bank of electricity meters, one for each apartment. Next to it is a bank of gas meters.
Is water different? I lived in a complex (of about 40x 2-3 storey buildings with ~12 apartments each) where they said the water bill was the building total divided by the number of apartments in the building. I wasn't complaining because it was so cheap, but I wondered if it was legal.
My lease in California has the water divided up like that; when I signed the lease it was specified as such. I guess the water is cheap enough that nobody really complains.
> I'm not really sure how measurements are done in big buildings (maybe someone could explain?).
Similar to klodolph - it's very common in the UK for each dwelling in a shared building to have its own supply, termination point and meter for both electricity and gas.
Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak, founded a company to do just this, called "GetHuman": https://gethuman.com/
It gives you an option, they can guide you through stuff giving you specific steps they've learned from interacting with the companies in the past, or you can have them handle it for you, for a small charge.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it.
Just learned a couple of weeks ago from a friend of me that there is something like this in Norway.
They only deal with technicalities around the invoicing, not actual usage but still claimed to maje a decent living by finding issues with invoices for 1/5 companies.
I once was on the phone for hours with Time Warner Cable about a $50 security deposit charged twice, that was a mistake on their side. Turns out I was paying someone elses bill! At the end I explained to the supervisor that I will keep calling back until they fix this, not because I don't have $50 to spare, but because this is their messup and it's a matter of principle. They put me on hold (for about an hour) until their technical team fixed up something on their billing system.
It's a pain to do this, and most peoples time is worth more, but if noone does it, we will be (in fact we already are) living in a scam society, where everyone is making money on everyone else's lazyness to track things down. When you call in, you are doing good not only for yourself, but for the company as well as every other customer.
Counterpoint: They are analyzing call logs to determine how in the future to better mislead customers and avoid dealing with callers like yourself, so every time you call in you're hastening the advent of an even more oppressive system.
My brother owned a vacation condo in Reno. He didn't rent it out and only occupied it 10% of the year. He always had a big electric bill. After eight years, he found out the meters were cross wires with the next unit which was occupied full time. It would have cost him more in legal fees to do anything about it than he could have hoped to recoup.
I'm not sure if statute of limitations applies to civil cases. As far as I recall, you can try to sue for any reason at all, although you may not be successful.
I did have baseboard heating. But it was a very tiny single-room studio, and what I was paying was still out of whack for baseboard heating. There was also one month when I was out of town, had the heaters off, and was still getting a large bill.
I got like a 800 bill one month for an apartment not much larger than you describe. Then close to that the next.
Turned out they had routed the hot water from the heater under the foundation to the taps and there was a leak. They came and jackhammered up a section of floor and fixed it and apartment complex wound up crediting me for rent.
As much as I wanted to fight, as sad as it sounds my time was worth more than the money I'd get back by spending time on the phone arguing and escalating the issue at critical hours of the day. :-/
Moved to California, paying a much more reasonable utility bill, and glad I didn't have to deal with that again.
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it. I once had to argue for 2 hours on the phone with T-mobile about $250 in excess charges on my phone bill, and while got it all back after escalating it to a manager, I'd totally pay $50 for someone to deal with the 2 hours of phone calls for me.