Inaugural blog

After reading countless comments on various blogs and news sites, I think a home for venting about and organizing a fight against Pepco needs to exist. I'm hoping people having problems with Pepco will stumble on this blog and we can help each other to resolve our personal issues with the company, as well as organize to do something on a grassroots level. That being said, I'll begin with my current Pepco issue and people can chime in with their own issues and outcomes as desired.

We moved into a house in Riverdale in June. We just received our first Pepco bill that runs from June 1 to July 7. I should mention some specifics: the house is approximately 1500 sq. feet, we run AC only at night except when we have house guests, and of the 6/1-7/7 billing period, the house was vacant for an entire week with only the refrigerator running. We were shocked and appalled when we opened the bill. Pepco claimed we had used almost 3000 kWh of electricity in that time frame. Seeing as we used a third of that in a bad summer month in our previous home, this just seemed wrong. It is an older house but it has energy efficient windows, we don't have any huge energy sucking appliances or the like. Something seemed fishy. On the back of the bill there is a section that gives the meter read outs for a start value and an end of bill cycle value. Ours was noted as an "actual read" -- more specifically it says "The present reading is an actual reading." This is important because Pepco will frequently not bother to send anyone to read the meter and give an estimated read. But no, in our case they claim someone actually read it. Our "Present reading" is listed at 3396 with a multiplier of 10. So I thought we should reconcile this with our actual meter. Oddly enough, on June 13 our actual meter reads 3321. So a week after the supposed actual read, we are over 700 kWh shy of the billed amount. This means our bill was at least 100 dollars too high at the current energy rate. I took a picture of the meter (I strongly recommend doing this with a date stamp before you start any battles with Pepco because they'll try to claim you misread the meter) and got to work trying to rectify the situation.

I called the customer service line, and after holding for an excessive amount of time, I was told that the read was an "actual read" so maybe I was reading "the wrong meter." We live in a single family home. I guarantee I did not accidentally walk into my neighbor's yard and read their meter. Since the customer service rep hung up on me with a "thank you for calling Pepco" before I could respond to this bizarre assertion that I read my neighbor's meter, I decided to try a different approach. I filed an online complaint with Pepco. They sent me an email saying they will contact me within 48 hours. My next step is to file a complaint with the Public Services Commission. You have to wait 7 days after contacting Pepco to pursue this. I will do so regardless of the response. I'm also planning to go forward with the Office of the People's Council, Better Business Bureau, and I will be writing a letter to my legislator. I've read too many comments where people kind of let it go once Pepco finally credited back their account months later. I think we need to move forward with complaints regardless of the outcome. There seems to be a clear pattern of "misreads" that result in enormous overbilling of consumers. Let's start coming up with ways to move forward and demand accountability. People are being bullied into paying bills for service they didn't use, people are out of pocket huge sums of money while Pepco drags their feet for weeks to "investigate" themselves. Enough. Let's share stories, assemble some evidence, and move this issue up the chain of power until someone does something about it. The economy sucks right now. Nobody needs to be paying for things they didn't use, nor should Pepco be gouging the consumers with rate raises while giving huge bonuses to their execs.

I'll post stuff as it happens, but for the time being, I am taking pictures of my meter read out every couple of days and documenting everything.