The next phase of the adventure will begin when we try to settle our bill with the Electric Company. The guy that measured the accuracy of our meter is not affiliated with the Electric Company; he is independent of them. He writes up his report and sends it on to them. They should have it by now. The meter checker concluded that our meter was running at 158% of normal. It’s good to have agreement that our electric meter was crazy, but we may not agree on the quantity of error. That 158% does not even begin to explain the 4,500 kilowatt hours of electricity per month we’ve been charged for. We had to be off by a factor of 5 or 10. Even if we agreed on the amount of error, how far back do you go to adjust the billing? We don’t have anything that tells us when the meter went bad, or how bad it was when.
Two years ago, Judy was telling me we should change electric companies because our bill was higher than everyone else’s. My response was that there are multiple electric companies in competition here. Is it likely that one company’s charge per kilowatt hour is going to me materially different from another company’s charge? Electricity is a commodity. One company couldn’t afford to charge a higher rate than the other companies or everyone would just switch to the other companies. It never occurred to me that we might have a mismeasurement of our usage. We’ve probably had a bad meter, getting progressively worse, for at least the last two years; maybe even since they installed it five years ago!
We suppose the Electric Company has a lot more experience figuring out this sort of thing than we do. Since we now know that electric meters *can* go bad, surely we’re not the only people who have had that happen. The Electric Company will have experience sorting it out. We’ll see what they come up with before we protest too much. Maybe they know how to settle this fairly.
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