What your Power company desperately tries to hide pt 2

Yesterday we established how your electricity company could bill you and not have any idea what type of meter you actually have on your property.

So you can see how the errors occur, you may be asking 'don't they read my meter every month and check that?'

The answer is no, they don't. All the meter reader is paid to do is to go out, look at the two meters and return the readings. In fact most meter readers wouldn't be able to tell the meter types apart.

You see meters have serial numbers, but these serial numbers to not link in any way to the type of meter at the property. All the meter readers do is return the readings for a particular set of meter numbers.

Having established that the meter readers won't check this information, who will?
Has your Power Company come out to your property to check the meter?
Have you done it?

The answer is almost certainly no.

The scary thing is if you ring up your electricity company and ASK them to do this they will say either "no" (the answer if you get most of the contact centre staff) or "we could but it would cost you $60.00"
$60 for them to do something any other business would do.
It's obscene and if it didn't cost you money it'd funny.

So how are you going to remedy this? Well Monday we'll explain some of what you can do to see if you are being charged incorrectly.
We'll give you a teaser, if you are in Wellington and have 2 composite meters - you are being screwed.

If you think we're being alarmist remember this - Genesis Energy is visiting EVERY farmer in the country because they have determined that HALF of all farms are being billed incorrectly.
We can assure you that the percentage is the same for residential houses, however the errors with the farmer usually result in the farmers being undercharged. However the errors in residential properties usually result in overcharging.

We'll explain on Monday, this is getting too long!


Minor update - We changed the date & time to reflect NZ time. For some reason it was previously populating with another timezone.