national grid billing issues
Hello from LA! I’ve been helping my mom in the Capital Region untangle a National Grid billing mess, and I’m wondering if anyone local has dealt with something similar.
Starting around October, after an electric smart meter was installed, she stopped receiving normal monthly bills for a while. In February, without even having a current bill in hand, she paid $250, and then the next month paid $200 because she was worried about getting hit with a shutoff. She’s older, an immigrant, and this whole thing has been really stressful for her.
When bills finally started showing up again, they were bizarre: catch-up/backdated bills with overlapping service periods, and the online account history doesn’t line up cleanly with the PDF statements.
What makes it weirder is that the smart meter seems to be electric only. The gas meter is separate and old. But she still appears to be getting billed incorrectly for gas. For multiple winter periods, the bills showed 0 therms, and the later gas catch-up billing was still implausibly low, which makes no sense for a house where the furnace, hot water, stove, and dryer all use gas.
I know people have been having issues with higher monthly bills with the new smart meters combined with rate hikes. The funny part is I had ChatGPT sort through her statements and payment history to estimate what she’s actually averaging monthly since the smart meter install, and it seems to be about the same as last year for the same period, if not slightly lower. I'm more concerned with the irregular backbilling and the incorrect gas billing/data.
A few questions:
- Has anyone had National Grid stop issuing normal monthly bills and then dump a bunch of backdated bills on the account?
- Has anyone seen obviously wrong gas usage after changes on the electric side?
- Did regular customer service fix it, or did you have to go through the Department of Public Service?
- If you disputed this kind of billing mess, what actually got results?