Although my blog isn’t and wasn’t designed to be a ‘gripe’ blog and honestly, I don’t normally hold onto an issue for more than a few days, I’m lending some space to my hydro story because of an article I ran across today in my search for solutions. In the April 17, 2008 edition of the Ottawa Citizen a columnist named Laura Drake covered a story about a billing problem Hydro Ottawa created for themselves and although they are crying that they ‘lost’ revenue over it, I think I know where they will be trying to get some of that back.
In my first post about our Smart Meter woes, I mentioned how the installation and billing for 4 homes here had gone awry. Now we are looking at just shy of $3500 in charges dating back to December 2006 (almost a year prior to Smart Meters here). The error involving our homes didn’t surface until Hydro Ottawa began playing catch up with some of the Equal billing customers, of which at least one of our neighbors was one. When she got a $500 bill she flipped. Another neighbor, whom I can only assume use to be on equal billing, claimed to receive $500 and $1800 bills during that same time frame (April – July 2008).
According to the news item Hydro Ottawa had not adjusted Equal billed customers for 5 years, dating back to 2003 and when a new billing system in 2004 came into play, they somehow just neglected to do any adjustments again for another 4 years.
So, over the course of the last 5 year period and including this current group of errors as related to the Smart meter issue now, Hydro Ottawa wants us to believe that their claim that our meter is “reading our home accurately” is all we need to bring us comfort and understanding. In light of the fact that our home has jumped from the highest ever one day kw use of 29 to the current average daily that bops between 60 and 95.5 kws per day? Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that one a bit more.
Akaiya
