Electricity problems

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Oct 20, 2005
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I think this is easier than everyone is making it out to be.

She got a bill from the electricity company for $54.

They apparently charged her $500.

All she has to do is call the elec. company and ask why they charged her more than what was on her bill.

I'm betting it's just some kind of miscommunication, like she is not understanding something, or confusing another charge with her bill, or something.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,579
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Maybe her electric bill WAS $54, and someone stole her CC number online, and there's a random $500 extra charge on her statement, that has nothing to do with her electric bill, but she mistakenly thinks it does, because she can't otherwise identify the charge.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,579
10,215
126
OP, might not be a bad idea to download Malwarebytes, from www.malwarebytes.com, get the Free Home version, install it, and run a full scan. You might have credit-card stealing malware on your PC.
 

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
8,173
524
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Have you paid any of these charges yet? You mention being threatened with a stoppage of your electric service, so I would assume not.

You say your mother recently passed away. My condolences. Was this her house previously? Is it possible that there are old charges on the account from unpaid bills, perhaps while your mother was incapacitated?
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
70,327
13,666
126
www.anyf.ca
TED devices aren't great, actually. If you look at the spec sheet for the Spyders, the design is terrible. Yes, I'm an electrical engineer, so my standards may be different, but the current transformers they chose and the associated analog to digital conversion have very poor tolerances. The unit also discards data way too quickly, which is ridiculous considering how cheap flash/storage is these days. I ended up designing my own with a raspberry pi and it is much more accurate with a reactjs interface that took a weekend to write.

I compared loads from 0.1 W to 1 kW in .1 W increments with my bench equipment, which is accurate to 0.02%. My version has an average tolerance of 1% with a maximum of 1.9% while TED is usually around 4% with a high of nearly 10%. The primary issue with TED is the minimum power draw requirement; if the wire is supplying less than 65 W of power, it will measure 0 W. This is a function of the current transformer's sensitivity and analog to digital converter in the MTU. I used a 12 bit A2D and a much higher quality CT, which set my minimum power draw to 4 W. Lower amounts of power will still be measured, but the accuracy suffers. Using solid core CTs helps quite a bit as well. I know they offer solid core CTs, but the ones I received with a TED Pro still performed poorly.

TED is fine if you want to know the rough power draw (100, 500, 1000, 10000 W), but I found it to be totally useless because of the accuracy and very poor historical data retention. It only reports data to the minute (some loads are seconds to 10s of seconds) and it only keeps the minute-based data for 25 hours. I've been reporting 36 CTs worth of data every 200 ms for eight months and I think the database is still under 200 MB. With a 32 GB flash card and a 2.5 GB OS footprint, it will record for longer than I will care before space runs out. If I get around to designing a custom board with a better A2D, I will probably put 32 GB of flash and an SD card slot for expansion to further trivialize this issue. Considering an SD card connector is $1, there's simply no excuse for this. Whoever designed TED seems to have no clue how to make a user-friendly piece of equipment.

That's good to know. I too was kinda toying with maybe designing my own at some point. Could probably even go a step further and have CTs on each branch circuit. Would be kinda neat to monitor each circuit individually too. I imagine it's tricky to design something like that though. Need to take power factor into consideration etc. Can get complicated to build.
 

Humpy

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2011
4,464
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You have a problem with the moderation? Make an MD thread. This is not going to be discussed in this thread.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

No problem with the moderation whatsoever. On that note, I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to say just how much I appreciate the work that is done to keep the forums at their shiny best. Kudos to you and your team!

If there are any further questions maybe it's best to PM me though. We might be disrupting this thread and I am looking forward to the exciting conclusion. I'm literally on the edge of my seat and trembling with anticipation.

Peace.

You can't say you weren't warned.
admin allisolm
 
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rcpratt

Lifer
Jul 2, 2009
10,433
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Or we let the experts who are paid to deal with things like this deal with it.
I'm sorry, I suppose I missed that proof that the utility has done something wrong here. I haven't seen anything to indicate that. She can't even clearly articulate what the problem is.
 

Mike64

Platinum Member
Apr 22, 2011
2,108
101
91
Or we let the experts who are paid to deal with things like this deal with it.
The first thing the "experts" will ask is what exactly it is she's being charged for and, if she believes it to be erroneous, whether she's tried calling them to straighten it out yet herself. If the OP finally figured what's going on on her own, she hasn't bothered to mention it here, and unless I missed that too, she had not even called them yet, the last we heard.

All we know so far is that her stated usage (per the bill) went down, but the total amount of the bill is 10x what it was at some point in the, presumably recent, past. It's simply irrational to assume the company is "gouging" her, rather than that there's some sort of fundamental misunderstanding either on her or the company's part and typically, utilities are quite good about straightening this sort of thing out when people do call them. For all we know on the stated facts, the OP (or perhaps her mother's estate) does in fact owe the company every last penny on the bill, but simply doesn't understand why (which might explain how it came to be owed in the first place)...
 

Jeanie831

Junior Member
Mar 27, 2017
14
3
16
If his electric company is reporting that he is using fewer KW/h a month does his meter really matter much at this point? I would think that, assuming he is correct, that we just ruled out consumption.

OP, can you post screenshots or pics of say January 2017 and January 2016 bills with your personal information blacked out please?
OK dump question, how do you post screenshots?
Sorry guys. This started June of 2015, I know I should of got on it sooner but I lost my daughter in early 2015, so I was really depressed and wasn't really paying attention. And yes I have been paying on it I missed a few payments here and there but not entire year of payments here is a screen shot first one is what kwh's were used and what I was charged for the month. The 2nd one is how much my bill rose from June 2015 - June 2016
 

Jeanie831

Junior Member
Mar 27, 2017
14
3
16
Have you paid any of these charges yet? You mention being threatened with a stoppage of your electric service, so I would assume not.

You say your mother recently passed away. My condolences. Was this her house previously? Is it possible that there are old charges on the account from unpaid bills, perhaps while your mother was incapacitated?
Yes I have been paying my bill not the whole amount at times. Thank you about my mother. No this was not her house she lived 400 miles away from me.
 

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
8,173
524
126
Yes I have been paying my bill not the whole amount at times. Thank you about my mother. No this was not her house she lived 400 miles away from me.

What is the total of the overcharges?

Can you access your bills online? There must be a line item or something showing where hundreds of dollars of additional charges came from. If they're billing you correctly for your actuall kWh used, then they came from something else.

(BTW, I'm originally from that neck of the woods - home of the Steelers' training camp, just down the road.)
 
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MrDudeMan

Lifer
Jan 15, 2001
15,069
94
91
That's good to know. I too was kinda toying with maybe designing my own at some point. Could probably even go a step further and have CTs on each branch circuit. Would be kinda neat to monitor each circuit individually too. I imagine it's tricky to design something like that though. Need to take power factor into consideration etc. Can get complicated to build.

I have a CT on every branch circuit in my house, every outbuilding panel feeder, and every branch circuit in each outbuilding. It was less than the cost of a TED pro and the performance is significantly better. I can easily see when my surveillance cameras begin to capture and transmit video to my SAN because the power usage jumps from 1.1 W to 4.5 W. Of course, development time has to be worth something, but I've considered making a product out of this because I just can't stomach using TED anything after looking at their super shitty specs. I don't think I have the time or inclination to go all the way to the end right now, though.

My setup:
  1. A Raspi 3 functioning as a controller is running a PHP API, MySQL database, and a nodejs server to serve the front end app
  2. Raspi zeros at each panel (five total) to do A2D and ethernet comms
  3. I recently replaced the Raspi zero in my barn with a custom board that has a better A2D and an fpga because I plan to run a lot of automated tasks (watering and feeding animals, etc.).
In the next month or so, I'm going to setup an EC2 instance to function as the controller because I'd like to be able to do more with the data.

This type of setup precludes the power company from screwing me over like what seems to be happening to the OP. They tried to overbill me once and I knew immediately that they were wrong.
 

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
8,173
524
126
This type of setup precludes the power company from screwing me over like what seems to be happening to the OP. They tried to overbill me once and I knew immediately that they were wrong.

Wow. All that OT crap about your amazing setup, and you apparently didn't even read the thread. As best she can tell, they're billing her for the correct kWh usage.
 

mxnerd

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2007
6,799
1,103
126
OK dump question, how do you post screenshots?
Sorry guys. This started June of 2015, I know I should of got on it sooner but I lost my daughter in early 2015, so I was really depressed and wasn't really paying attention. And yes I have been paying on it I missed a few payments here and there but not entire year of payments here is a screen shot first one is what kwh's were used and what I was charged for the month. The 2nd one is how much my bill rose from June 2015 - June 2016

Did not see any image/statements you posted.

Launch Google Chrome, visit https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/screenshot?hl=en-US

add Fireshot or Awesome Screenshot extensions, then you can capture webpage as images. Upload the image to any photo sharing websites.

When you post a reply in the forum, you have option on toolbar that shows image icon, click that and you can enter image URL link.

===

And if you missed several months of payment, then probably that's why you got billed $500 instead $54. o_O
 
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MrDudeMan

Lifer
Jan 15, 2001
15,069
94
91
Wow. All that OT crap about your amazing setup, and you apparently didn't even read the thread. As best she can tell, they're billing her for the correct kWh usage.

I responded to this thread multiple times to help the OP and I've read every word. You're just too stupid to extrapolate the final step - knowing the billing rate and multiplying it by known usage. I didn't think I needed to explain that because it should be inherently obvious, but I was wrong. Also, I never said it was amazing nor did I imply it. I said, relative to TED, which is expensive and inaccurate, a DIY system can be very useful and not difficult to build using off the shelf components. The implication was systems of that nature can help with the situation in this very thread, which makes all of the conversation about power measurement systems the very definition of on topic. Nice try, though.
 
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Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
8,173
524
126
And if you missed several months of payment, then probably that's why you got billed $500 instead $54. o_O

That could very well be the explanation. Unless we're talking about being billed $500 each month (which isn't clear, but doesn't seem likely). Could be a combination of months not paid, plus finance charges, perhaps other penalties.

If the OP can just go back and review each statement beginning in June 2015, I have a feeling that where all of the charges came from will be apparent.