It was bound to happen. The day we closed on the house, our utility provider, PSE&G, read the electric and gas meters. Well, read the gas incorrectly, it turned out. And it’s time to pay the piper.
Since moving in at the end of June, we only got one utility bill — $54, for 3 weeks. It was still cool-ish out, so we didn’t need the air conditioner all that much. I let the meter reader guy in to do his thing in mid-July, and found that it wasn’t 9300 (i read the meter myself and knew it was off), it was more like 8900. So from mid-July until now, we had not received a bill. I thought, “Hey, maybe we’re getting the 400-therm difference as a credit. Wouldn’t that be great?” So I put off calling PSE&G to figure it out. I would log onto my online account, and it would just say “0” for the meter reading every month for the past three months. Awesome, right?
Wrong.
Today, the PSE&G mystery was solved — we got our bill. And it was only $400, despite covering the months of high A/C use (August/September) and the last month of heat usage (I turned up the thermostat a LOT earlier this month).
Looking at the fine print, it seems the utility provider credited us that $54 we actually paid from the July bill, and recalculated everything from then to now. That’s four months. And $32 of it is our Worryfree contract, which covers the oven, cooktop and furnace. So 400 bucks divided by 4 is $100 per month. How awesome is that? Of course, the gas bill is estimated, since I haven’t been home to let the meter reader in since July, but I just read the meter myself and they’re only a few therms off.
I’m quite pleased, actually. Not that I have a big $400 chunk of a bill to pay in the next two weeks (along with all of the other bills that have arrived), but I have hope that the winter may not be as terrible on our heating bills as I thought it would. I budgeted $300/month for PSE&G, so we’re below budget on that. It’s more than likely we’ll reach that figure in the colder months of December/January/February, but at least the money’s there.
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