[Reddi Kilowatt]

Hello,
My name is Red and I live in the Northeast United States. The locals refer to my area as “Down East.” I used to like the power company about as much as anyone can, when they were a public utility. I helped build some of there power plants and overhauled their turbines and generators in oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro plants I like electricity for most things. I don’t like electricity for my truck or my skidded. Our company sold out after de-regulation and now a foreign company runs the billing office and calls other companies when lines go down. They canned the friendly meter readers and gave us meters they program to tell them how much juice we use. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. I typically use 600-700 kw/no, 350-500, if my wife ain’t around. My September bill came and they wanted $1100+ The only thing I’d done different than ever before was run the air conditioner a lot less. I called and complained, to no avail, of coarse and heard their excuses and advised me to monitor my usage on their website. Well I didn’t bother because 2 years prior, the told me to do the same at my camp, where I only have 2 receptacles feeding 2 40 watt bulbs and aradio. I shut the main breaker off every time I leave. I left for the winter on October 15. November, December bill were both over 50 dollars! They insisted I forgot to shut something off and insisted they shut it off, permanently. In the end, I needed to give them the meter number. I had it put in just 4 months previous. So, I drive 3-1/2hrs up there and when I got done snowshoeing up the driveway, I thought I’d meet my maker before I made the last 59ft through 5ft of snow to the meter. I did make it over and got the number. Going back down was much easier and once I got in and started, I lit a smoke and called the Power company woman with sent me on that near deadly mission. I read her off the number and there was an “oohhhh,” followed by 3 or 4 minutes of silence. Yup you guessed it, they were billing me for the wrong meter. I’ll ask my question next post.

[Author]

Posts