Bennett Price wrote:

Take a look at the bill; does it cover only the period since you've been
in the house? Maybe you're paying for the last tenants.

Rob wrote:
I recently moved into my house and I got my first full month's electric
bill and was floored. It was almost $150! I have never lived somewhere
with a bill over $80 for a single month. On top of that, this house does
not have some of the common big time electric drawing appliances. My hot
water heater, dryer and home heating are not electric. The only electric
appliances that run often are the fridge, the sump pump and a portable
dehumidifier in the basement

Anyway, I want to see if I can determine what the primary culprit is in
this very high meter reading. I am thinking it might be the
refrigerator. The fridge is an older, built-in Sub-Zero model which,
while nice seems to run a lot. Long story short, is there a device I
can purchase to put between the fridge's plug and the wall outlet that
will measure it's electric usage over a period of time, say a day? If
not, what is the best way to guage the usage of this appliance? I don't
have a backup fridge to use while I turn this one off for a month and
see what next month's bill looks like, so I'm looking for an
alternative.... Also, I looked up the model on the web, but did not find
any info on it related to electrical usage, so that is not an option...

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Rob

Along the same lines, it is an electronic remote read meter or an old
style visual read meter? With the visual read ones it's not at all
uncommon for the reader to misread a digit which if an upper digit can
make a very noticeable jump in your bill. Fortunately it's self
correcting with the next correct reading since it's a cumulative
reading.

At a previous location I had several meter reader screw ups of this type
in the year or so before they installed the remote read meters. I guess
they cut the reader force and hired the cheapest people they could get.
In each case I just called in to the utility with the current reading
from the meter and they adjusted the info in their system and gave me
the corrected bill amount to pay.

I had one really funny occurrence on a service at another location that
was not in use for a few months (main breaker off). This was a remote
read meter as well so you'd expect accurate readings. What happened was
that the meter mechanism was apparently teetering right at the
transition point of the lowest digit.

One month the reading came in 1 kwh lower than it read the previous
month. You'd think the utility's computer would flag this massive KWH
used reading, but instead they sent a $15K bill. When I called them the
CSR got quite a kick out of it and of course the bill was corrected to
the ~$5 base service charge and 0 KWH used.

Pete C.