Recently my flat of five people told Contact Energy to fuck off and signed up with Powershop after months of grinding our collective gears.
For the last nine months Contact Energy had been providing us with monthly power bills based on estimates, saying that we had not provided them with adequate information to access the meter. This, despite the fact they had both our door codes to get to the meter and were given them as early as January and had repeated calls telling them they have the access and giving them actual readings.
Then when we changed the names on the power account after a flatmate moved out, they hit us with a bill of $1243. After calling them to query this outrageous bill, they revealed that not only had we informed them of the access codes in January, but the PDA’s issued to their contractors are unable to display all the information.
After seven months of that you would expect Contact Energy to maybe, I don’t know, ask us to provide them readings because as a multimillion dollar company they couldn’t read six digits in a box? Even more absurd was the way they conducted their estimates of our power usage by using meter readings of our flat from a year or two ago. Meaning we were getting bills of between $130 – $150.
After numerous calls, we managed to get the bill reduced to just over $600. Our issue wasn’t that we didn’t want to pay for the power we used; it was Contact Energy’s blatant disregard of responsibility as a provider. For a flat that always paid the power bill on time and did everything we could do to provide Contact Energy access to the meter, the way Contact Energy treated us was repugnant and offensive.
Now with Powershop, we know exactly how much power we use, and can buy the cheapest power from a range of electricity providers. For next month our power bill looks to be at least $100-$150 cheaper compared to what Contact Energy was inflicting on us.
But hey what would expect from a company that decided to almost double its directors’ fees while putting prices up. No wonder Contact Energy customers dropped from 529,000 last September to 491,000.
Go sign up today, www.powershop.co.nz.
Seamus Brady Vice-President (Welfare)
wvp@vuwsa.org.nz