Garston cafe owner Tony Corbett got a shock when he saw his latest power bill. Contact Energy charged him $1100 when his normal monthly power bill is about $200.
His sister Tess Corbett had a similar problem in Kaiwaka – her bill from Meridian Energy is usually about $34 a month but the last one was $394.
The cause of the problem appears to be the meter readers’ inability to read the meters. They’d given a six-figure killowatt reading instead of a five-figure. The sixth digit on the meter is a unit counter and was read as a unit of kilowatt power so Mr Corbett’s 177 kilowatts had been recorded as 1770.
Memo to staff trainers: meter readers need to know which numbers they are supposed to read and record.
Homepaddock 
And this is the fault of the current 🙂 New Zealand government, how exactly?
I just can’t see the link.
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I wonder how fast he drove back to work. If it was anything like he reads his meter it would have been about 10k.
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Poneke – just like your blog some posts here are politics-free 🙂
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[…] not meter readers at fault? On Sunday I wrote about the shocked customers who received power bills for much larger sums than usual and then blamed meter readers for […]
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