Electric Meter Saga (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Electric Meter Saga (2017)

nattaylor.com

33 pointsallthebest10 comments

I had a very similar experience with a water meter. When our small town installed smart water meters, they accidentally switched ours and our neighbors. It took me far too long to figure it out as I became progressively more obsessed with water conservation and monitoring of usage and watched our water bill continue to climb.

The penny finally dropped when I was standing in front of our house having ripped open the latest water bill to see an amount now having grown to be over $200 for the month (more than twice where it had been to start with) and looked at my dry, parched lawn that I had barely watered and my neighbors luxurious, green lawn. Getting our money square with the city took another 4 months and resulted in a rather unhappy neighbor.

Keeping historic readings of your meters is extremely useful. I made a habit of scanning in the bills I got from my water company, which showed that on average I was using ~40m^3 of water a year - I'm very conservative with water. In 2015, a bi-annual bill dropped through my door asking for payment for 120m^3 of water in six months. I hadn't changed my usage patterns, and by phoning them and quoting the previous bills, they quickly agreed it was extremely unlikely I was using four times my annual supply in half the time. They took it from there, investigated and discovered a leak just after my water meter (under panels in the road). From my previous bills, they quickly agreed to knock 99m^3 off my bill, bringing it in line with my usage.

Imagine your neighbour, watering the grass and thinking damn with these new meters I'm using even less water. Water is cheap, better use more and it's still going down. Must be some sort of bulk discount.

I had something very similar happen. Our power bill went up 30% in March of last year over what it was in February after the power company installed a smart meter. This was odd because March was so temperate that we didn't use our HVAC once and we have a gas water heater. I called the power company and we confirmed they were reading the right meter. Trying to evaluate it further went nowhere as they claimed that despite the increase, we were in-line with other homes of our size and suggested maybe our analog meter was wrong. After a few weeks of arguing with them, I ordered and installed a Sense. It absolutely doesn't track at all with what the power company is reading and I shared the differences including my own measurements with an ammeter on the 120 lead legs into my meter which match with what the Sense is reading but the power company won't investigate further. To mitigate the increase in electricity use, I decided to get into the cryptocurrency mining business and have gone from ~$200 to ~$600/month power bills, all of which are easily paid from the mining. Since I was lucky enough to start last year, all the hardware is paid as well (thanks December crypto currency market madness).

My story is sort of similar too.

Many years ago, I noticed my power bill was around $190 when it should have been closer to $120. I wasn't home for most of that month, and I know I turned off everything I could. I didn't even have the refrigerator running. I talked to my neighbors who had heat and everything on in their apartment and their bill was $110.

I called the power company who said there's nothing wrong and that I need to have someone "look at my apartment." I got another bill for $190, while everyone else's were low $100s. This went on for 6 months. My bills were always $190ish. I had a $190 bill near the end of spring when I just had my windows open for air.

I looked at the meters and found they replaced one meter, which happened to be mine. I called several times asking if they replaced it, that my bills were ridiculous for what I was doing and to look at it.

No word back on anything then my bills went from $190 a month to $15. So instead of saying anything, they just started to cut my bills down for what I overpaid. When I called asking why my bills were lower, they just said because I overpaid my previous months bills. My bills were around $15 a month for close to a year afterwards...

So stupid. They ended up discounting me for a few hundred more than I should have been, but I had to cut a few things out of my budget just to pay for something I wasn't using, but needed.

Contact your public utility commission.

Wow, that sounds really illegal. The electric company's behavior, I mean.

I wonder if there is a group that would test your power output independently and help push (through legal enforcement) a reduction in charges.

You might consider documenting all this and going to small claims court.

Having had a casual interest in power usage, I bought a little inductive meter with a wireless display. It proved itself, so I upgraded it to a cloud-connected one which stores huge amounts of historic data. Every so often, I download the logs and compare the usage the device has logged with the usage the electricity company has billed me for. So far, it's added up roughly correctly.

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Typographically speaking a line of body text shouldn't run in excess of 60 characters, but this is a bit extreme. Firefox' Reader View really comes in handy for these kind of websites.

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