Bl**dy power companies!

Merry christmas Genesis Energy and thanks for my farkin' huge power bill due to your inevitable inability to correctly estimate our power useage - it would also be nice if your online system worked so I could send in our meter readings every month but as the last two times I did that you never sent me the updated account and then tried to charge me a late payment fee until I spent an hour on the phone talking to you about why your stupid systems don't work, I am no longer bothering! It is just so good of you to do the reading now so we get the big fat bill just before Xmas. Cheers for that!

I wish it was easier and cheaper to go off grid as I hate being tie to this damned electricity company. I just don't understand how we can be charged so much when we live in a tiny house, have a fire for our heating (water on wetback but don't use fire at this time of the year of course) and only cook on the stove once a day, if that. I try to turn everything off when it is not in use, at the wall - guess I am going to have to get even more diligent. I am really bummed tho, it's a really big bill

Anyway, rant over, as you were!

Lou, I am sure if you ring them and explain the situation they will help you plan a payment system.
I assume it is correct?

It's ok, I would rather pay it, it was just a nasty shock - I had a quick check of the box and it seems to be right. No idea why it is so high or why we have been so underestimated tho. It seems we use more power in Sep-Dec than we do in May-Aug - I don't understand that and we are using more now than we did at this time last year but really cannot work it out as we have no new appliances. Probably going to turn out that the freezer and fridge need replacing - Gawd!

Hi Lousie,
We had a power bill from genesis $1000 more for one month!! [:0]We had a fault on our power pole by our house which blew the ceramic thingy and they had to come out to fix and put a modern one, but after 6 weeks of wrangling with them and a measly $50 refund even though they admitted it was rather strange when they looked back over the 2 years we had been here how much our bills were, we had to pay it, but what we do now is read the meter ourselves and ring it in and we get an updated bill 2 days later or so which we pay.

Louise I vaguely recall hearing about some gizmo you can borrow/hire from "somewhere" to measure your electricity consumption. You start by turning everything off and turn appliances back on one at a time, and can then identify the power guzzlers. Might be worth tracking down.

Umm, it's called an electricity meter, and it's mounted on the house somewhere.

Seriously though, it might be worth doing your own meter reads daily, if not hourly, to see what your demand pattern is like. If you can switch off *everything* then the meter should be still. If it's not, then you have a phantom load somewhere (a heater, a light, or something you forgot about or didn't know about). Common culprits are fridges and freezers- they do consume a significant amount of power, but of course they're not on all of the time. You can improve them a little bit by keeping the coils clean at the back. TVs too. People often don't realise quite how long they are switched on for.

You can buy a plug-in thingummy, but it's not worth it. You can get the power consumption of the label of most devices, and you can easily calculate the expected usage per month, and from that the expected cost.

A

Yes they do seem to have a nack of not being able to guesstimate accurately[!] Lou have you checked your electric fences? if they are arcing etc I would guess it would increase power use. When we had the crisis a few years ago and everyone had to try to save power we managed to halve our bill by being more diligent, shutting PC down at night, switching TVs off and not leaving on stand by, filling the freezer with bread when it was cheap etc.......

You may need to take extra stock on for grazing in Feb to earn some rent [}][}][}][}]

we have had no end of trouble with them over here too. The first account we got here ever was an estimated one and though I can't remember how big it was large. I queried this (when I got to speak to someone eventually) and they told me it was estimated. I asked on what basis was it estimated. "on the use 12 months previously" I replied that there was nothing at all here 12 months ago not even a builders box, so no power. I again asked on what basis they estimated. The rely this time was "an average of locals". I again asked on what basis as there are only 2 permament neighbours for miles. Again the person "went and asked" and the final reply was that there was no basis, it wsa just a number plucked from nowhere. You possibly heard the explosion from your place Lou! We agreed then that they would not send estimates for the first twelve months. This conversation then automatically generated a "revert to the previous address for billing" (????? which I had sorted out monthly for 3 months previously) and also caused my MIL's account to be sent to us as well! Recently we had another incorrect estimated account so we went through the saga again, except that this time the amount was ginormous again becasue they hadn't sent us any account at all for something like 4 months. In Wellington one year they did the same thing, didn't send an account for months and then expected me to pay within the usual number of days. Totally useless. Contact is pretty bad too - we recently had a gass account from our Well place (now gone thank goodness) where the amount was large - when I rang and said that this numebr couldn't be correct as the house had been empty for 6 months and the gas usage about 0, their response was that there must be a gas leak and that I should go and check it. When I pointed out that this would entail an hour and a half round trip and how would I tell anyway, there was no answer nor any suggestion of help from them.

Here in Christchurch nearly all of the houses now have an electronic meter fitted with a radio. The radio allows the meter reading to be transmitted any time, except that in this part of the city there is a problem with the radio network, so our meter has not been read. Since May. We get an estimate every month, which has been set to the minimum default, so we are being charged less than we use. This means that when the network starts working we'll be billed for the actual usage, which is greater than the estimated usage.

Still, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that there is a bill to pay. It doesn't matter if you pay monthly or even yearly, the amount is the same. And being billed low means that the money you don't pay is sitting in your account earning interest.

Incidentally, the radio system in Christchurch is the same as the one that is installed around the Hawkes Bay area. That was the pilot project for this one.

A

I think here in the Wairarapa we pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. I remember the shock we got when we got our first bill here and that was an estimate and then we got a reading and nearly fell over. I guess I should just suck it up tho aye Ame!

Our place in Christchurch still doesn't have one of those radio metres...

Diane

I can completely sympathise with your predicament!!

At my previous house (small 2br with me and two dogs!) I got a power bill for $650 one month!!! Spent months arguing with Genesis about their bad systems and their meter readers who lie! (I recorded all my days for readings and their readers lodged readings on days they never visited my property!!)

So... to cut a saga short I had a Pay as You Go meter fitted. It was free to fit and we have installed one at our new house too. It's great. We buy the credit, punch it in to the meter and the power gets used up just like a cell phone.

I love it as we never get any more scary and incorrect bills and we can monitor our power usage through the little box on the wall.

Buying the credit is no problem as there are a few places to do it and we just schedule it with our groceries so its all sorted in one go.

I would highly recommend changing over if you are having problems because I don't believe it will ever get any better!!!

Good luck

Libby

Louise W;221079 wrote:

I wish it was easier and cheaper to go off grid as I hate being tie to this damned electricity company.

Off-grid is not as low running cost as it may seem. Battery prices have climbed significantly over the last 2 years and the ageing cost now will, in many cases, exceed a modest power bill.

The last two enquiries I had for off-grid were in reasonable distance of a grid connection so I convinced them it was better to go grid-tie and offset their consumption. Lines charges are lower cost than the battery ageing.

powerguy;221255 wrote: Off-grid is not as low running cost as it may seem. Battery prices have climbed significantly over the last 2 years and the ageing cost now will, in many cases, exceed a modest power bill.

The last two enquiries I had for off-grid were in reasonable distance of a grid connection so I convinced them it was better to go grid-tie and offset their consumption. Lines charges are lower cost than the battery ageing.

I just quoted one of my customers $4500 to replace the batteries on a solar system. If Grid connection is less than $20k, go for the grid connection.

Genesis have different schemes for setting the rates they charge and recently they looked at them all and some people had them changed. So it may pay to either look back at your accounts and see if it has changed to another (and probably dearer) scheme. I think there is a brochure or maybe on their website, a list of the different schemes, so try to work out if you are on the one you should be, then call and ask them about it. When they did the checking I realised our flat in Wellington should be on the low user rate and since the account is in Hubby's name and he is there 5 days a week, I felt it could be classed as his main residence, so we now pay less for usage there. Also the consumer website has a section where you can put in your usage and it will tell if you are with the best company.