Meter Reader Craziness

The water meter in down in a hole on the sidewalk... You sure about that? In my area the access holes in the lawns and sidewalks contain only shutoff valves. The meters are inside the houses, right where the pipe comes through the wall.

It's normal. I've lived in WA, AK, CA, IA, ND, Winnipeg MB and Louisiana. This has been the policy in all those. They do that to ensure that the amount you pay is averaged. i.e. your bill isn't too high in the winter [if you live where it is cold] or too high in the summer [if you live where it is hot]. [Not being snarky hopefully] I suppose you can read the meter yourself. In some of the colder states you can not pay for six months - an interruption in electricity can result in the customer dying. So, yeah, totally normal in my experience.

Even though you pay the same company, it might not be that they are efficient enough to have the same person read both meters. We pay the same company for gas, water and electricity, and despite the fact they are all due within a few days of each other, we have different meter readers for each (and different phone numbers to call them to talk about each). I think they try to keep the branches of the company that are responsible for each utility functionally fairly separate. So sometimes one is estimated and one is read. Our water meter seems to be lazier than our electricity meter reader, for what it's worth. Water is mostly estimated, and electricity generally read, even though the meters are within a few metres of each other.

Hmmmm...have you tried reading the meters yourself? Should be relatively easy to read the numbers off the meters every 30 days just to double check. Frankly, I would continue to pursue this with your gas/water/electric company. When I lived in NYC ConEd estimated my bill one month as $700 (for a tiny studio); it took me over 4 months of repeated calling to finally get the whole thing resolved.

My gas and electric go to the same company and they were never read by the same guy. I have no idea why. But yeah, different dudes, one meter was in my basement, and different months of estimates vs. real readings. Now they are all read by the magic of computers so its always exact and no dudes come by. (Water is a different company but also magic meter now.) The helplines and outage lines and repair guys are TOTALLY separate, which makes more sense I guess. Natural gas is ALWAYS an emergency; electricity is more likely to go out over a large area at once. I can see why two utilities with such different maintenance needs might keep two hierarchies in place and that might make sense for keeping readers separate. Do they have a voluntary update to computerized or WiFi reading, or a pilot program? We even got a discount for signing on to the pilot, and its really much more and better data on the bill. I thought we were late to transition so I assume everyone else already has magic meters!

Are you in Australia? Is your energy company Energy Australia? if so this happens to us and we've been fighting them with the ombudsman for the best part of a year. We actually have to pay $17 to have the meter read. We're happy (well not really) to have this happen, but they won't to it. They estimate three time greater than our actual usage - that's great, we're actually trying to cut down on consumption - y'know - climate change and all. Anyway, I think it's normal. Our neighbours have the same issue. The company claim it's because we have a fence! - yeah, but we do supply a gate.

You say this happens "randomly" - does the same guy read your meter each month, or is it a few different guys? Because that sounds like maybe one of those guys is just lazy.

Even if they read your meter every month, they aren't going to be consistent about how many days are in a billing month. Our billing month may be 25 days one month then 34 the next. It just depends on when they get around to actually reading the meter. Not that it really matters to me anyway. We signed up for the bill smoothing service years ago. I'd rather get a $99 gas bill every month versus $40 bills in the summer and $200 bills in the winter.