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I got hosed on utility bills a few years ago. Moved into a small 1-BR, and setting up utilities was extremely expensive. Here it turns out there was a couple living there before me, who worked from home and ran up the electric bill every month with heating in the Winter. They billed me for their usage history for like six months, and wouldn’t give me a refund but “credit that would go to my next bill.”

Basically paid my electric for the rest of the time I lived there, and didn’t get any kind of refund when I closed the account.

I'm starting to feel like I'm not paying my bill until the end of March. I don't have autopay. No one should, I know it's convenient, but I would be livid if that much money "automatically" came out of my bank account. Fuck auto pay.

It’s not PPL job to shop for the best rate. That’s on you. PUC sets the PPL rates for generation and distribution. The consumer can shop for the best generation rate

Well of course they have to just repeat what was said. It is a new outlet what you think they are reporters or something?

/s

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Cave yoga sounds amazing.

It's more useful to file a PUC complaint, it's very quick and easy.

https://www.puc.pa.gov/complaints/

I was also hit with an "estimated" bill that was at least 2x my normal bill for this time of year. If you can't get through to PPL, you can file an informal complaint through the PA PUC:

https://www.puc.pa.gov/filing-resources/forms/complaint-forms/

It won't result in any immediate help, but the PUC may light a fire under PPL so they don't "accidentally" pull this stunt again. The fact they didn't immediately correct everyone's electric bill (but were quick to offer payment plans) tells me this was not the glitch they claim it was.

same here and its saved me more than a few times in the past

Illustrates the danger of autopay. Better to manually pay the bill each month. Lots of things are legal many wouldn't expect. Fortunately, due to the huge number of complaints, PPL has recently announced they will allow late payments with no threat of shutoff nor late fees through the end of March.

If only we had a word for when money is taken against the owners will...

I'm calling my state senator....

PPL still hasn't explained exactly what happened. Be nice if some news media would press them on it, but most news outlets simply regurgitate whatever a company or official says.

Noticed a new 5% System Improvement surcharge. PPL used to be relatively affordable with good service. Not anymore. PPL is seemingly not shopping for the best rate possible, which is what they're supposed to do. Their default rate of 14+ cents is among the very highest of any utility in the state. Distributers aren't supposed to profit on supplying electricity, but suspect PPL is in some roundabout way. Very shady and should be investigated.

This right here is exactly why I don’t allow automatic payments on most things.

I'm also shocked by my natural gas bill which is $100 higher than December (already high-average), it was my highest utility bill ever (it's not even cold!!!!). This kind of financial hit could be devastating to someone . Both get automatically deducted on the same day.

It at least might give the people responding better empathy… but they’re still cops with guns (we don’t need armed police officers responding to these situations). But even so, I doubt it.

I work in an ED that has cop supervision for security purposes. We had a schizophrenic man in a psychotic state who was stuck with us waiting for placement for over 2 weeks (a story in it of itself). And multiple different cops (I actually lost count in how many) came up to me on multiple different occasions and just said absolutely horrific things about a clearly mentally ill man.

“They should just lock him up and throw away the key, he has crazy eyes, you can’t fix that”

“He doesn’t deserve a hospital bed while he’s waiting, he deserves to be locked in a cell”

“You guys shouldn’t even be interacting with this guy. He should be in a locked room with no windows and cameras”

“I don’t even know why he’s hear, you can’t fix him”

And this is in an incredibly wealthy suburb with cops who are supposed to be trained in dealing with mental health crises. And EVERY TIME they had to respond to him acting out, they made the situation worse.

The sooner we as a society realize and try to actually correct the flaws in our police force (that is, start over) the better off we all will be.

What is happening over there?! They also completely messed up however the estimate bills and told some people they owe twice as much for Dec and Jan. And their response is “oh we will even it out in the next few months bill”. How is this shit legal?

They do their best but I never found them all that helpful. I feel like the commonwealth is making them as much enforcers of UC as they are employment counselors. I went there during the 2008 recession after just finishing college and the guy told me I was “unemployable” because I couldn’t do construction or any kind of hard, repetitive manual labor.

Had to pump up the earnings report for the stock price. Someone must be trying to get a hefty bonus.

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It's still "Guns going in first" to take control. Not sure how this is an improvement on anything.

Nope. They just made it look like they did.

The Barbarian 2

The radio report I heard said that PPL said it affected up to 800,000 customers. I can’t even fathom how this could occur. If I were involved in their customer support, I would quit immediately.