Aaron Ratzlaff nearly fell over when he opened up a $6,000 SaskPower bill for his Asquith, Sask., acreage.
He was shocked, considering he spends most of his time working out of province. His lighting is LED, there’s no air conditioning and he said a propane fireplace reduces his use of electric heat.
“There’s no way. I don’t run an aircraft carrier here,” Ratzlaff told Global News.
He lives with one other person who also travels for work, and whose biggest use of power is watching Netflix.
Usually, he said a three-month billing period runs him about $1,500 — one quarter of his bill dated from April 30 to July 24.
The price is “astronomical,” Ratzlaff said, and “it would put most people into the poorhouse.”
He suspected his power meter was malfunctioning or there was an accounting error, but a customer service representative told him that’s not the case.
SaskPower sent a power line technician and meter technician to the property Friday.
For homes, SaskPower does its billing based on average consumption from the same period of the previous year. Then, a worker reads the meter annually, and the difference is added or subtracted from the next power bill.
It means when homes change ownership, there can be a discrepancy between previous and current owners’ usage. Ratzlaff has lived in his house for a year and a half.
“Currently, the best way to avoid this is to record your information off the meter yourself and report it to us on a monthly basis,” said SaskPower spokesperson Joel Cherry.
Eventually, the power company plans to re-introduce smart meters that record consumption in real time. However, there’s no target date for residential implementation.
SaskPower is in the midst of a pilot project with more than 8,000 smart meters on commercial and industrial businesses. Over the next year, another 20,000 commercial smart meters slated for installation.
Asquith is about 40 km west of Saskatoon.
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