Help needed with my new WAPA bill please

It's possible they have been estimating your bill low for a while and finally actually read the meter, and it all caught up. Have you read your meter and compared it?

Good luck with WAPA customer service!

This one might have been an estimate as we were not home when they read it, but the others have all been actual readings as I am home and always go out and say hi to "my" WAPA (while trying to keep my puppies quiet 🙂 )

It was dark when we got home and opened the bill so we will read it tomorrow

Pia

Or perhaps, they read the meter wrong?(I`m not allowed to make remarks regarding incompetence amongst other things it seems around here)
Check the meter reading against your bill, do you know how to read it, it`s easy, if not, I can help.
You should also note the average consumption amount on your bill.
The 22 day billing cycle seems strange, perhaps Juanita is right as the 22 day may be your WAPA anual aniversery!
This thought makes me want conjer up all kinds of aniversery love songs between us & WAPA, care to post your favorite?

We had to get ours straightened out. Find someone with a lot more power than a customer service person (get their direct phone number so you don't get pushed off by the customer service person), and call them every few days until its fixed. Make them want to fix it just to get you to stop calling.

We get 17 WAPA bills per month. As often as not, 4 or 5 of those will have a meter reading on the bill that is considerably higher than the actual reading the day the bills arrive, which is about a month in arrears. Since we have tenants who pay their own electric, we have given up on WAPA. We now read the meters ourselves. We try to do it on the same day WAPA reads them so we can make sure it is eventually balancing out.

We had a unit that was running about $250-$275 per month, with the a/c running 24/7. The tenants moved out and the apartment was vacant for several weeks, actually coinsiding with the WAPA readings, The bill for the vacant period was $675. That's when we really started watching them very closely. When we called about it, they were like yeah, yeah, we know. We have gotten 3 bills with a credit balance, and the funny thing is they don't state on the bill what the usage was. I don't know how they do it, but they showed on the last bill a usage of negative 16 Kwh. Our reading for that time period was a normal 400kwh or so.

The high bill ($675) was before the rate went down. Now we are getting credit for all those kwh's, BUT at the new lower rate. Sounds like a scam to me!

I also have a similar problem with my estimated bill. For the 2 months before the 'decrease' my electric and water were higher than my mortgage! I went in and after an hou and a half was told the yada-yada about estimated bills and how they every 4 months or so seem to get a 'correct' reading. Does ANYBODY know exactly HOW they do this when my big bad trained dog has ALWAYS been tied directly under my meter? Are they hiding out somewhere in the cassia bush behind my house with binoculars?? If so, why not do it every month?? My bill finally went down 2 months ago as it should have with the decrease. We have NO AC and run the bare minimum as well as putting in all those twirly-bulbs. So WHY has my WAPA bill just rocketed back up to the same as my mortgage again?? (ok-$5.45 less...)
Anyone out there with any help for piaa and us??

No help but some adivice. Even though it is a pain in the neck, you should ALWAYS go in person, if possible. The only time I call a utility is for an outage. Otherwise,I I hike myself down with any and all paperwork and sit and read until someone is able to assist me.

most likely your problem is with wapa, but i know someone who lived in judiths fancy that had a neighbor steal their electricity. and their water. keep an eye on that just in case

We have known a few people that had issues with people stealing power (one construction crew working next door used their outside outlets for weeks before they figured it out). When we re-wired our house we had all exterior outlets put on one circuit breaker so we can keep it off unless we need it.

it sounds like your bill is about 800 too high, which is over 2200 kwh too much. usually meters are misread by only decimal increments, like 1000, or 10000. best starting place like the others have said is to read meter yourself.
i have one account that i've been running negative balance while my meter is catching up to a bad estimate from last spring. i had just paid the big bill, and it is working out with new correct readings.
on another account, i called and complained that my meter was misread by 1000kwh, which last summer was over $500 off. what happened next caused me alot of work. in that case i had paid the big bill, and after i paid, they changed the reading in their computer, but didn't give me the credit. so it was like just throwing $500 away. it took me over 2 months for them to understand what they had done, and finally i got a credit, but as juanita has mentioned, we are now getting the credit for less expensive electricity than we originally paid for. if you can afford it, just pay the bill, and get 3 or 4 months of not having to pay in the future.

i just had another idea. check the meter number on the bill, and see if they have changed meters on you or some other thing like that, sounds like that might be why you had a short time period this month. then you really have to talk to a supervisor to get things ironed out.

help me understand estimated bills . . . does this happen to everyone? my meter is easily accessible by the road. i am pretty sure every wapa bill has shown readings, I do not remember seeing anything notes about readings being estimated. my wapa bill had a credit this month which surprised me with more credit to be applied on the next bill. i am not going to call to see if this was a mistake 😉

I think the bills got a little quirkier than usual right after Omar. Our first bills, after the storm, were for only 2 weeks, and they were quite high. Then we got one for 6 weeks, which seems low for that long a period. That month some of the bills had credits. I wonder if it had something to do with everyone at WAPA working overtime, and possibly a redistribution of job duties, for a while. It could also be WAPA knew the decrease was coming, and they wanted to get some high bills out there before the rate went down.

SunOrSki...good question. I KNOW I am an estimated reading (big dog...they will tell you so) but haven't ever seen this "category" in print on any of my bills. Anybody out there who has?...and if so, where on the bill do you find it?

Also...I've heard over and over the "mistake" big bill where you eventually get credit...but what happens if you don't have the finances to pay the "wrong" bill? If I were to get a $1000 bill by error, I know I could NOT pay it. Could they REALLY shut me off? I know that they won't "work with you" anymore to pay off your bill (right or not) after the cut-off date. Has anyone ever gotten to this point, and if so, what happened and what did you do? As I mentioned earlier, they've done it to me again and I had to borrow money just to get past the cut-off again. I'll tell you...it makes me seriously pissed to feel like this because I have no other choice. (it only was a matter of 2 days for my next paycheck, holidays you know!...but nope...no lenience for me.)

Any input is most welcome.