Are you paying for your neighbours electricity?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been focusing on understanding my electricity consumption, with my post about how much it costs to run a freezer being one of the most read posts on MillionaireAdventure. A couple of months ago I started taking daily meter readings to see how much electricity I used and noticed something very odd. Bizarrely on Sundays and Wednesdays my electricity consumption doubled.

There was no obvious reason for this regular surge in consumption so I embarked on a process of trial and error, switching off different devices each day to find the cause. After a couple of weeks I was left with only the lights left and it was very unlikely to be them so running out of ideas I switched the electrics off at the fuse box inside my flat. To my amazement the meter kept spinning away…

So wherever the electricity was going it wasn’t inside my flat! Next step, to the meter itself where there is an emergency cut off switch which is linked directly to the meter, that had to stop the meter spinning and it did.

Unfortunately it also cut the power to my neighbours flat, oops!

Stupidly the meters had been mixed up, a case of a ‘crossed meter’ to use the electricity companies terminology. I had been paying for the neighbours electricity and he had been paying for mine. What followed was over two months of constantly chasing the two electric companies involved to resolve the issue and several weeks of debating how a revised bill should be issued.

Now I am a qualified accountant and consider myself good with numbers, but not even my qualification could help me understand how electricity bills are calculated. I have never come across anything so complicated.

But after weeks of arguing and creating many scenarios on spreadsheets we finally reached an agreement. This meant that despite using more units than my neighbour and therefore leaving me facing a higher bill, a compromise was reached whereby they would actually reduce my bill, a total saving of £39.29 compared to what I had previously paid. A lot of hard work, but nevertheless a nice result in the end.