A Sydney woman has urged customers to check their gas and electricity bills after she was overcharged by more than 80 per cent.
The elderly widow, who goes by the name Wendy and asked for her surname to be withheld, said she was shocked when she received a gas bill for $640 last month from Energy Australia.
"I nearly fell over," she said.
"And then I thought, 'You are not getting away with this.'"
Wendy said she knew immediately the bill was wrong, because the only gas she used in her upper north shore home was for the ducted, underfloor heating.
The underfloor heating hadn't been turned on since spring, Wendy said.
Wendy said she looked at what her quarterly gas bill had been in April of the previous year and "it was zilch".
After going outside to check the gas meter herself, Wendy then called Energy Australia to provide them with the meter reading.
After reviewing the matter, Energy Australia issued Wendy with a revised bill of $110, a saving of $530, or 82 per cent.
A spokesperson for Energy Australia said the inflated $640 bill initially stemmed from an incorrect reading Wendy herself provided for her previous bill in January.
9news.com.au understands Energy Australia requested Wendy take the reading because the distributor responsible for meter readings and estimates, Jemena, was late in providing data relating to her actual gas usage and an estimate would therefore be used instead.
Wendy informed Energy Australia of her error within three days and the correct reading was applied to her January gas bill, showing her usage at zero.
However, the correct reading was not recorded in Jemena's system.
At the next quarterly billing cycle in April, a meter reader from Jemena took an actual read, but this was deemed an error because it was lower than the previous incorrect read.
Jemena then produced an estimate based on the incorrect figure, resulting in the wildly inflated $640 bill.
Wendy said it was concerning that Energy Australia and Jemena's systems did not detect that the bill generated was vastly different to her previous usage patterns.
A spokesperson for Jemena said it provided physical reads for 93 per cent of meters each billing cycle.
"A small number of bills (are) estimated when our meter readers are unable to access a meter," the spokesperson said.
According to Australian Energy Market Commission's National Energy Retail rules, energy companies are required to make their best efforts to use actual meter readings for bills, rather than estimates.
However, in cases where a meter cannot be accessed on a property, because of a locked gate or dangerous dog, for example, they are allowed to use an estimate.
Actual readings should be carried out at least once every six months.
When an estimate is used, energy companies must state on the bill that it is an estimate.
NSW Energy and Water Ombudsman Janine Young said individual energy companies often took different approaches to labelling estimates on their bills, and some were not as clear as others.
"Sometimes the indicator could be just a little 'e' next to the actual bill amount, others will say in quite bold letters 'estimated'," Young said.
"What I'd like to see is (energy companies being) more proactive about letting customers know that they can provide a self-read."
The NSW Energy and Water Ombudsman received 1475 complaints about estimated bills in the last 12 months to the end of May.
Problems with energy bill estimates came into focus during the pandemic when meter readers were unable to take actual readings, Young said.
Complaints to the ombudsman peaked in the middle of last year and had remained relatively high, she said.
Young said she was aware of some companies contracted to provide meter readings suffering workforce issues due to winter illnesses, leading to more estimates.
However, retailers should still be trying to ensure that actual readings were carried out as frequently as possible, she said.
"They also need to look at the amount of the estimate too, and if it doesn't correlate with past usage for that customer a bit more work should go into it," Young said.
Douglas McCloskey, from the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, said energy companies were not proactive about fixing access problems with meters and were sometimes estimating a customer's bills for longer periods than they should.
Other customers living in disaster zones, such as Lismore after the floods, could end up getting estimated bills for years because proper metering had not been restored, McCloskey said.
Estimated bills could also prove to be a problem when there was an underestimate, leaving customers owing large amounts of money, McCloskey said.
"When they do the catch-up, it might mean you get an energy bill saying, 'Oh, by the way, you're now $500 behind'," he said.
Most people were busy and didn't have a lot of time to read their energy bills carefully, leading to inaccurate estimates being missed, he said.
"The simple advice is to be on top of it and try to make sure you do see each bill.
"If you get more than two estimates in a row, you should be contacting your retailer and saying, 'Hey, why aren't I getting real reads?'"
