form letters

So I received my "response" from Pepco right on the 48 hour button. Nifty how that works out. And no surprise it was a form letter:

Dear Ms. Jackson,

Thank you for contacting Pepco. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Your account has been forwarded to our Investigation section and has been placed under investigation. While your account is under investigation, you are not required to pay the disputed amount. You are required to pay any undisputed bills. If our review determines that the disputed service has been provided and your bill is accurate, the customer must pay the full amount of any outstanding balance.

Please allow 6-8 weeks for us to fully complete your account investigation. You will be contacted by mail regarding the outcome of the investigation.

Should you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at https://www.pepco.com/contact/online/.

Thank you for visiting Correspondence.

Sincerely,

C. Lamont Reddon
Internet Correspondence Department
Customer Contact Center
Pepco
701 Ninth St. NW
Washington, DC 20068

So I have multiple problems with this "response." One, it is a form letter, which is not a response to me at all. It does not address my problems, it is a do not reply address so there is no way to engage with C. Lamont Reddon. Since their phone customer service reps were similarly disinclined to engage with me (ending the call mid-sentence with a thanks and good bye), I essentially have no way to communicate with the company. I have no idea what their "investigation" will entail, because this letter was written to be applicable to every complaint they get. My "investigation" could be easily resolved by sending someone out to read the meter, or by simply asking me for the photo of the meter that I mentioned in my complaint. I will be mentioning this in my public service commission complaint.

Additionally, this letter is completely unclear about whether or not I should pay the current bill. It says not to pay the disputed portion, but I have no clue how to calculate that since they overbilled by an undetermined amount. I'm not claiming to have used 0 kWh, but I have no idea how many kWh I actually used since I checked the meter over a week after the billing period ended. Should I calculate the bill based on that number and just rework the math myself and pay that? Because that would be technically incorrect as well. I suppose we will pay the whole bill and then wait for the credit once they catch up the correct meter read. That irritates me for a variety of reasons, the primary being that the extra money I pay for their screwup would have been earning interest for me during the time I wait for them to correct the problem. I'm seriously considering generating a bill for the interest after they correct it and sending it to them. It would be a small bill, like a couple of dollars tops, but it is sort of the principle of the thing at this point.

Cutting down on electricity use

In the post-Pepco overbilling fury, I decided that even though we aren't excessive users of energy (compared to other non-Amish Americans) I don't really want a single unnecessary cent of my money lining the pockets of Pepco's execs. So this involves some decisions about what is necessary. Clean clothes = necessary. Because I use cloth diapers this necessitates use of the dryer more than I'd like as they take forever to line dry and when it is humid they do not dry at all. Running a dryer load of only cloth diapers is wasteful, so other clothes get thrown in too. Necessary evil for us. Hot meals = necessary. As healthy as an all raw diet may be, it simply won't work for our family. So use of the refrigerator and stove/oven are also necessities. Some cooling of the house when it tops 80 outside? Necessary luxury. How we cool it and how much we cool it leaves a lot of wiggle room though. Ceiling fans and oscillating fans combined with opening windows for cool morning and night air seems to be doing the trick pretty well. Is it warmer than ideal for me? Sure, but I'm willing to tolerate 5 degrees hotter in the house to avoid turning the AC on. If you turn on your AC and go watch your meter spin, you'll find a really strong visual motivator to turn it off if you can bear it. I'm now checking my meter regularly to monitor use. I'm trying to cut back whenever possible.

Also, another option to stop putting extra money in the Pepco coffers is to go with an alternate supplier. Yes, you still have to pay Pepco for delivery, and yes, this is annoying in the extreme, but the delivery rate is not what kills you on the bill. We are going with Clean Currents now and getting wind generated electric. You have to do it in 1 or 2 year contracts, so make sure you read the fine print. It's not a good move if you are planning to move out of state. But you lock in a rate that right now is a full 1.5 cents lower than the current Pepco rate. That's 10% less you'd spend than if you use the SOS through Pepco.

I'll try to keep tabs on the meter and keep posting about how much of a dent we can put in our use. This wasn't the primary issue for our huge bill, that was just Pepco lying about our meter read, but I'm angry enough that trying to cut down on use to keep from paying Pepco any more money than I absolutely have to seems appealing.

Pepco saga day 2

No response from Pepco. So much for the 24 hour end of the 24-48 hour window for responding.

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.