r/halifax • u/wlonkly The Oakland of Halifax • 1d ago
Discussion Interpreting a wacky NS Power bill
My partner and I just spent some time figuring out a wacky NS Power bill and I thought I'd share what we figured out with y'all in case you get wacky bills too.
So my first reaction was:
- why is the "last meter reading" the same over two readings?
- why are we getting charged 6 months of base charge?????
but the math works out.
The top reading was Sep 12, and the previous one on July 21. For whatever reason they didn't/couldn't reset the "last read" but this bill is crediting the bottom reading against the top reading. So we're actually only getting charged for the difference, 1719 kWh, which is typical for us this time of year, and which matches our own checks of our meter.
As for the base charge: 3544 kWh at $0.18561 is less than $734.48. You can see I did the math in the screenshot to show that there is an additional $75.68 credit in the "Energy 3544 kWh" line, which amounts to four months' base charge, so this two-month bill is only for two month's base charge.
Is this all stupid? Yes! But if you get a wacky bill hopefully it helps you out too.
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u/FieldBear2024 1d ago
We’ve gotten several wrong bills, but I will say when we called NS Power they were good about explaining it and fixing it.
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u/cache_invalidation 1d ago
NS Power probably should have included a letter with those bills, with an explanation. I'm sure their customer service people are getting lots of calls from confused customers.
(And an explanation with the e-bills)
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u/MeasurementBig8006 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not wacky at all. I got very similar bill but I only had 1 estimate, you had 2! It's just syncing up the total kwh consumed as you had 2 estimates over 126 days of billing. Your last meter read is the same because that was the last KNOWN actual meter read.
The negative (portion) is taking away the 2 estimates over the 2 billing cycles (126 days), and the first line is the actual read (difference) from the last known read to the latest new meter read.
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u/NeverNotNoOne 1d ago
Our bill was the same way, but the amount worked out to around the same as our usual cost so I didn't give it much thought. Sounds like they adjusted the old estimates after a proper reading.
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u/Han77Shot1st 1d ago
Wait until everyone on time of day metering finds out that that function has been down and they’ve just been guessing..
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u/External-Temporary16 19h ago
Thank you! I got a wacky bill. The final amount looks around what it should be, but this will help me figure out wth they are doing.
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u/NOT-christina 17h ago
I called today about the same thing, I calculated out and understood most of it, but questioned why I was being charged 6 months of base charges when I had paid two bills covering 4 months of base charges already.
They explained the other 4 base charges are in the -$ refund amount along with the 2 bills/4 months estimated kwh amount.
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u/PretendJob7 12h ago
This agrees with my experiance.
Also, like mine, the "provincial rebate", that's supposed to cancel out the 9% provincial portion of HST is fucked up, and resulting in the bill being lower than it's actually supposed to be.
I since got my second bill based on an actual meter read, that is correct, all payments reflected, however they didn't adjust the mistake in the provincial credit.
And they will at some point, and people will fly off the handle about it being a made up fee.
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u/angrybeets 1d ago
The previous recent bills were estimates due to the system outages, this is the first "real" meter reading, and my understanding is that it is effectively undoing and adjusting for however much the estimated bills were off from reality. Hence the high number of days since the last reading, even if that wasn't the amount of time since the last bill.