<p>In the PDX airport, they have these really cool toilets
[Eat</a> your greens: So much to know about low flow | PDX Green - OregonLive.com](<a href=“http://blog.oregonlive.com/pdxgreen/2007/12/eat_your_greens_xxxxxxxxx.html]Eat”>Eat your greens: So much to know about low flow | OregonLive.com)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t necessarily assume there was a missed payment. There may have been a payment made after the bill was due and it wasn’t reflected on the current bill. Make sure that’s not the case before you pay this one, or otherwise, it’ll take forever to get the difference back.</p>
<p>btw… our gas bill is $137/month on the budget plan (our heat is gas). That includes heating a pool for a few months out of the year, too, so not too bad.</p>
<p>If the bills crossed, it should be possible to see the status of the account on line. And if there is inadvertently an overpayment, it’d just end up as a credit on the account that would then go toward the next month’s bill. As cold as the winter has been so far, it shouldnt be hard to eat up that credit!</p>
<p>Sigh</p>
<p>Every year someone complains about the toilets.
Every year I “push” the use of washlet bidets for holiday gifts for yours and theirs.
Nothin finer than a warm seat and clean warm water where it counts. </p>
<p>Get a pellet stove. Carbon neutral, help clean up the forests, control your heating bills.</p>
<p>I was waiting for that subject to come up, LP!</p>
<p>Also, there is tremendous variation in electirc and gas billing rates from utility to utility (Con Ed in NY and PECO and PGW in PA have rates that are a multiple of other utilities).</p>
<p>Dad IIs bill of $300 a month might actually have less energy usage than someone with a much smaller bill.</p>
<p>We have a boiler from the 1920’s and usually have two months in the winter where the gas bill is @ $500. Our present boiler fills up a small room in the basement. Newer models are about as big as a bread box! But, this boiler works great and we’ve been told that replacing it would entail bringing in an asbestos removal team, as there is probably asbestos wrapping the pipes, etc. That with the cost of the new boiler and the installation, I think we’ll just tolerate a couple of high bills a year. It would probably take 20-30 years to recoop the cost!</p>
<p>Wow $39.00 a month on the budget plan in a condo with 8 inch thick brick walls in the midwest. Peoples gas is behaving it’s self now. They had some Arthur Andersen Scheme going a few years back and everyones gas bill shot up to $700 to $900 a month. They got caught and had to refund everyone $150 bucks.</p>
<p>Just confirmed. We did not miss the last payment.</p>
<p>DW forgot to make the last THREE payments. The last bill paid was in September. The the latepayment charges are huge. </p>
<p>It is the holiday so I am not going to be upset. Just glad that I found out the issue before they cut our gas.</p>
<p>Dad II…glad to hear you found this out before the service was terminated. What happened to the last TWO bills which also would have shown past months’ payments due? Make sure there are no other bills that have gone unpaid. You do know that bills paid late DO affect your credit rating.</p>
<p>Seriously Dad II…check ALL of your other bills…mortgage, phones, car payments…everything. Make sure your bills have been paid.</p>
<p>I suggest 1.) billpayer account; 2.) budget billing. </p>
<p>I have a checking account that is used exclusively for paying bills. I don’t have checks for the account, nor a debit card. All regular (and sometimes irregular :D) bills are paid out of that account through the online billpayer service. Mortgage, utility, and phone bills are scheduled as recurrent bills, so I don’t need to do anything more – they get paid once a month automatically. With budget billing for the utilities, I pay a set amount every month of the year save one; one month is used to balance the account, so may be for more or less than the regular monthly payment. </p>
<p>I consider college savings a bill, so automatic deposits to the 529 and another account for college are also made through this account.</p>
<p>Credit card bills are paid through this account, too, but those I enter each month. The kid’s college costs are also paid out of this account, as are the costs of taking/getting him to/from school, dues for the neighborhood pool, and any work on the house I have done.</p>
<p>This makes it very easy to track usual budgeted items; discretionary money is deposited into another account, and I can run that account to zero between paychecks without worrying about unpaid bills or overrunning my budget. </p>
<p>I like knowing that if I get hit by a truck and am lying in traction somewhere for weeks, my bills will still be paid!</p>
<p>We’re on autopay - the electric, natural gas, phone and internet bills are automatically deducted every month. I wish the water utility would do this too as they are quarterly and it’s easy to forget. We don’t pay much for power and natural gas. We have a nuke and a big ng-fired plant in the state and they provide far more power than the state needs. Natural gas prices have been creamed but I just noticed that they’ve doubled since September. Very impressive rally that I seem not to notice. Hmmmm.</p>
<p>I have a lot of shares of an oil energy trust that pays about a 10% dividend yield. I got $330 from 5,000 shares this month from one account (pays dividends monthly). I have another 20,000 or so shares of these elsewhere. It’s like printing cash compared to my money market accounts (it’s nice to subsidize bankers). If I’m expecting a cold winter, I usually load up on energy stocks before the weather gets cold.</p>
<p>Locally, the New England Patriots are going to install a bunch of Solar Panels so that they could perhaps lower their electricity bills by a third. I wonder how far we can go with this in the economy. Can we do this for houses in a cost-effective way? We’ll need cheaper batteries and cheaper devices to convert sunlight to energy.</p>
<p>it turns out, the energy company updated their database and somehow lost all our banking information. They also replaced paper bill with e-bill but DW pays paper bills only. They have since taken out the late fees etc and we paid our due bills. Everything is o.k. now.</p>
<p>autopay is great but I forget to look at the bill and have no idea what our consumption is month to month. A friend went solar for $10-15K (i believe) and her first bill was under $2. Our avg electricity bill is $300+. If I knew we were staying in this house forever, I’d go solar, too.</p>
<p>So if they switched to ebills and stopped sending paper bills, how did you get a paper bill in month 3?</p>
<p>jym626, I found out of the $5xx bill on line from e-bill and thus started the investigation. </p>
<p>We did get a paper statement the day after that - notice to terminate services due to none payments. Glad we got things work out.</p>
<p>Dad II…you need to check ALL of your bills. Companies are REQUIRED to give notice if they are switching to online notification AND you can continue to get a paper bill if that is what you indicate. SOMEONE in your household checked a box somewhere for your bill to be online only. Make sure this didn’t happen with other bills (like your new car). Most companies now are strongly encouraging their customers to “go green” and get everything online. BUT you do have the option of not doing so. You have to read carefully.</p>
<p>Seriously…check EVERY bill that comes into your house. Call everybody that sends you a monthly bill. If you want a paper bill…TELL THEM YOU WANT A PAPER BILL. They will send it to you.</p>
<p>Oh…and if it were me…I would add MY email to all notifications so that if something gets overlooked by Mom2, you’ll have gotten the notification too.</p>
<p>So are you saying you have been getting ebills all along for the last few months?</p>
<p>Some companies offer small financial incentives to switch to ebills (like a small account credit) and some companies, if you log into your account, have a box checked that says you want to get your bills on line, and you have to UNCHECK that box. I saw that once, but suspect that strategy is not common, as it is kinda sneaky and leads to bad customrer relations (lots of PO’ed customers yelling at customer service reps). Either way, I agree with thumper. Someone had to initiate the request to switch from paper bills to ebills, and they have to have been given an email address in order to set this up. Someone in your house had to initiate the change.</p>
<p>My credit union required you to check the box for online statements to get into your online account. You then had to call the credit union to turn paper statements back on. I’ve seen all sorts of attempts to get customers to go to online stuff and it is all over the place with regard to the level of deviousness. Another approach that I’ve seen is the click here with the default to online statements enabled. To get through without selecting online requires a link that is hard to find on the page.</p>