Amy Davis has been all over the huge charlie foxtrot with Houston's water billing where tons of people are getting crazy bills, meters aren't actually being read, etc. I'm curious if anyone here had any problems with their bills?
Several months ago I got an unusually high water bill, but never got around to digging into it. This month I got another big water bill, so I finally went through all of my bills for the last year. It turns out they weren't reading my meter - they were estimated my bills. Well ... significantly UNDER estimating. Eventually they would get around to actually reading the meter and I would get a "catch-up" bill for all the water I used in previous months. The fun part about catch-up bills is once you exceed 3,000 gallons, the rate for each 1,000 starts to increase significantly, and anything over 6,000 gallons on a bill gets expensive very quickly.
If this has happened to you, you should be able to ask them to balance the catch-up bill across the estimated bills and the recalculation will reduce the rate for each of the 1,000 gallons that gets balanced onto a prior bill.
Several months ago I got an unusually high water bill, but never got around to digging into it. This month I got another big water bill, so I finally went through all of my bills for the last year. It turns out they weren't reading my meter - they were estimated my bills. Well ... significantly UNDER estimating. Eventually they would get around to actually reading the meter and I would get a "catch-up" bill for all the water I used in previous months. The fun part about catch-up bills is once you exceed 3,000 gallons, the rate for each 1,000 starts to increase significantly, and anything over 6,000 gallons on a bill gets expensive very quickly.
If this has happened to you, you should be able to ask them to balance the catch-up bill across the estimated bills and the recalculation will reduce the rate for each of the 1,000 gallons that gets balanced onto a prior bill.
