Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire $17,000 Power Bill

Sounds self inflicted to me. Auto pay sounds like some kind of government sheit.

I owe almost nothing, except for the monthly things you can't get away from, but you can bet your sweet ass, you don't get access to my sheit.

But but but....auto pay is so convenient and secure!

Yep
And I was down with the covid & didn't even see the flood in the yard till I went for a blood test . Two freakin weeks later!

Never could understand giving people access to your bank account.
We do auto pay. They bill our credit card.
We get rewards for the amount billed, all our bill then get paid with
one check and stamp.

And if there is an issue, we can dispute it, they haven't taken our money.



As to the bill.
This is just like an adjustable rate mortgages.
They show you a low fee(in good times) and warn of higher rates.
People want what they want. NOW. And don't pay any attention
to the part they don't want.


Gotta laugh.
Some of these idiots knew their rates were skyrocketing. So, they
tried to change back to the normal utility deal. And the utilities
wouldn't let them.

For good reason.
After bailing for cheaper rates, they want to come back.At a time that the
utilities are paying more for energy than they are charging.


Same thing hit some here 10+ years ago.
They signed the contract and bragged how smart they were.
Then, prices went up, and they got bills up in the thousands.
Got media involved, tried to get politicians to help.

No way Jose!

The guy signed with the Utility provider whom happened to be the cheapest provider per KiloWatt at the time. The contract specified auto payment from customer's account and had a small print clause that specified under certain conditions that the rate may change depending on wholesale Megawatt rates. He agreed to terms and signed contract. The Power Generation Plant I work for has said that wholesale MegaWatts where indeed selling for $9000/Megawatt on spot market for a brief time during this cold snap. We delayed taking 650 MegaWatts off for maintenance during this time to sell load on market. Texas decided on their own that they wanted to be a deregulated power state. Regulated rates are about $.12/KiloWatt no matter the weather. Don't go down when low power demand, but they don't go up in high power demand either. It's either a free capital market or it isn't. Good or bad to both sides. Not sure if there was a way for him to know what rate he was on, but nobody forced him to leave his main breaker on. You have to read the small print, variable rates and auto pay from his account. Can't assume any company with share holders just has your best interest at heart and not theirs. I totally sympathize with the guy, but as they say, there's the other side also.

Yea, fuqk that guy, he had it coming, he for sure deserved that 17K power bill, what an [bleep].

You're an idiot.

The free market isn't always fair. 97% of the time he got lower bills but this time he lost big. I think it would be a pita to keep constantly checking prices plus you need to have a generator so you could stop using power during crazy events like last week.

Yeah, I guess reading what contract you sign isn't important anymore. He probably sends in extra money when he pays the cheap rates too. This place seems to be full of fuqkin idiots as you probably know from experience. Texas is a deregulated state. He could have chosen to buy power from a provider with a higher locked in rate, but he went for the low hanging fruit and signed a contract with a variable rate when the rate was lower than average at the time. If you feel bad for his poor decisions and not reading his contract, send him some money. The whole world is looking for a bailout for poor decisions now.

That's a dirty shame.
That happened to me too one time. The water companies fault that was working on the road next to my meter. They cracked it on my side from prying torque. Then my bill went way up and I found it and they blamed me for it. The time battling it was as costly as the bill. Those companies have no accountability.

Ken Lay still at it; never believed he really died.

Why I never use auto pay. Back in the day of land lines, I once had the phone company charge me $4,000 for phone calls. The bill showed several overseas calls that lasted for 20+ hours. I had made the calls, but they were measured in low minutes, not hours. I got threatening letters, threats of collection, ruined credit, etc. Then the phone stopped working and a tech came out. It turned out that there was a defective relay that would allow calls to be made, but failed to hang up once they were done, hence the billing for super long calls.

The phone company was very nice about it once I had proof it was their fault, but it's a LOT easier to deal with an impending bill than trying to beg them to give you your money back. Plus your money's not gone.

Pretty sure the governor told people not to pay exorbitant bills...
This is the other end of the see-saw next to the negative oil futures from last spring.