just got my water bill............

Diggindeeper wrote:

IDT-572 wrote:You say you cant check your usage, your wrong. Just buy a amp recording meter and a calculator and figure it yourself, all you have to know is what voltage and amperes your using over a fixed period of time. But be sure to take out all the bullshit fuel charges , state, and federal taxes. just look at the price per kwh and total kwh used.

Just to clarify, Taking your ampere reading and multiplying it with your line voltage does NOT give you a Watt reading, regardless of what we all learned in electronics. Volts x Amps gives you VOLTAMPS. You are Billed by the KWh. you are using KVA/h. Thats one of the other things i believe the smart meters can take into account. How good of a "power factor" you have. You'll want a 90% power factor. You CAN check this by the amp recording device, and deviding your metered consumption by your recorded consumption, you should come up with something around .9XX
Thats one of the things i'm trying to get into is power factor correction...but the meteres cost a fortune for the average guy to get into.

Big end users in Tn. are penalized for bad power factors by us because TVA our supplier penalizes us . Here the PF for a resident is not that bad. it wouldn't be $15 on $200. Residential meters here do not bill on KVA , Just KWH. We had a guy come here trying to prove his new revenue reducing gadget, all it cosisted of was a bank of capacitors, and when ut in line with the load on the meter you could actually see the amps drop on a clamp on amp meter, but the revenue meter never saw it because it only registers real power not KVA. If these smart meters are reading KVA and everyone jump and buys capacitors and adds them to the grid, it could bit the power companies in the rear.

Now with that being said, if these new Smart meters are billing on KVA and Time Of Use, and the rate structure was so that if you were using the most power during, I.e. peak demand 6:00 AM - 8:PM, and you are getting penalized for consumption of power during that time. Depending on the penalty rate , your bill could quadruple.

But as I said , the meters are generally correct , and are not being manipulated by the power company. People like you and I are in the billing and metering department.

You need to look at the billing statement and see what and how you are being billed.
And as far as how you are treated when you call in.............. Well we have had a few butt holes here that answered the phones as well , but the people at our facility as a group are good people, that try to help our customers.

Alls good, guess they have been getting a lot of calls, mine wasn't the highest lol.