A Regina man who received an exorbitant power bill has a message for fellow homeowners: check your bills and pay close attention to your meter.
“I was completely shocked,” David Cornelius said of the bill he recently received. “It was actually closer to $1,200 when my bill is usually around $100 to $150 every month.”
Cornelius has lived in a two-bedroom home in Regina’s north end for the past nine years. Used to relatively low power bills, he called SaskPower-- the crown corporation that provides electricity in Saskatchewan -- soon after getting the excessive bill.
“I told him that, ‘Hey, this is what’s happened,’” Cornelius told CTV Regina. “I thought it would be an easy fix and it would be over and done with.”
It wasn’t.
Cornelius said he spent weeks calling SaskPower and that on multiple occasions he was told that nothing was amiss. Eventually, SaskPower asked Cornelius to provide readings from his meter dating back to the time he was billed. When Cornelius produced that information, SaskPower finally admitted that a mistake had been made and promised to send over a corrected bill.
Speaking to CTV Regina, a SaskPower spokesperson said that the utility does have an alarm system in place that alerts it when a home is being charged more than its average bill.
“Unfortunately, sometimes there would be a reading or there would be a bill that would get through it,” SaskPower spokesperson Jordan Jackie said. “This happens very rarely, especially when it comes to meter read issues.”
While Cornelius is happy with the result, he also said that he’s worried that people who don’t diligently check their bills or record their meter readings might not have the same positive outcome that he had.
“The whole process of waiting and sending in my bills, the dates and the readings that I had, luckily,” Cornelius said. “The general public, I got to think, probably doesn’t do that.”
With a report from CTV Regina’s Josh Diaz
