Does your power bill include your meter reading?

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RegGuheert

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 19, 2012
Messages
6,419
Location
Northern VA
I'm curious about what sort of information those who have some sort of net metering arrangement find on their monthly bill. The reason I ask is that my power company just changed their bill format.

The old bill had a dearth of information and basically ONLY included the high-water-mark reading from the past 11 months as the "old" reading and the actual current reading as the "new" reading IF AND ONLY IF the new reading was higher than the "old" high-water-mark reading. Otherwise, the "new" reading was simply given as the "old" high-water mark. That was it. I often wondered how much I had consumed during the month, but it was good to know what that high-water mark was.

The new bill has three numbers on it: consumption during the month, production during the month and net consumption (which is the difference of the other two). Those numbers appear to be based on hourly meter readings from my single meter. But even though the net number is over 1 MWh for January, the bill is for 0 kWh (since I did not exceed the high-water-mark reading). But there is NO MENTION of any actual meter reading.

So I'm trying to figure out how, without any meter reading on the bill, do I make sense of the amount I am billed for in months like January when net consumption was more than zero? How can I know what the old high-water-mark reading was for the past 11 months and by how much I exceeded it, if at all? I have some of that information right now because of the old bill, but how will I know what is going on a year from now?

My question is this: Is it normal for power companies to NOT include the meter reading(s) on the monthly bill? More specifically, does YOUR bill include meter readings on it, or just amounts of energy flow?

TIA! I will use this information to try to decide if I should push my provider to give me more information on the bill.
 
Here in North-East Wisconsin (WPS or now WEC) our bill includes the meter readings. I do read our meter weekly and it matches up. I am not sure if some of the newer meters you could read yourself? It seems odd they wouldn't share that though, maybe some folks were confused by all the numbers :)
 
Reg,
I think you are asking for a running total, right ?

I would probably just keep my old bill around for a month and update the new bill when it arrives.
Rinse and repeat.
 
My bill sounds like your old one: it only includes the meter reading, which goes up or down depending upon whether I generated more than I used.

I use a USB RTL-SDR dongle (like this one for $13) and read the meter myself using open source software (http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/). I can then take the generation reported by my inverter and substract the net meter reading to show my consumption. My net meter only returns a single value (the current) reading).

(Edit: National Grid in MA also)
 
We're on National Grid in central MA and our bill includes last months reading and the current end of the month reading so we can easily see if we've been credited for kWhs or consumed them, month by month. Is it possible to read your meter and track it yourself?
 
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