Paying the prostitutes electricity!

flashnazia

Thanks for all your advice.

Employer has decided to call an electrician out to see if they can shed any light on who the meter is supplying.


Trouble is, we don't know any so going through yellow pages (which is something I always advise against when looking for tradespeople).

They claiming it's a whole days work to find out who the meter is supplying (and that's a wild guess).

Any idea if this is yet another rip off?

GLR1980_2

I used to work in the Technical disputes department for Yorkshire Electricity, my job was to work 'trace jobs'. Engineers were sent out to trace the positions of the meters and which properties they were supplying. It can be extremely complex if there is a lot of meters together e.g. a large block of flats. However if only two meters are involved it should be reasonably straight forward (if 2 different suppliers are involved it may also be complicated). I don't know if all electricity companies do the same but they should have something similar. My advice would be to find out what meter serial number your supplier has on your account and also get your mpan number confirmed by mpas. Also like previously suggested I would turn off all electricity, including lights & fridges (allow 15-20 mins) and then check which meter has stopped. Our team was very thorough and we were often the last straw when customers had spent months/years talking to the muppets in the call centre (lack of training in most cases). One block of 150 flats in leeds took 10 years of numpty's messing up accounts for me to sort it out in 1 year. You just need to drop on the one person who will go the 'extra mile for you'. Sorry I'm waffling now, get back on the phone to your supplier and ask for a trace job or something similar. Hope that helps x

ceridwen

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
Sorry - just hit my funny bone. Seriously though - it certainly is possible for someone else to tap into a meter and I have known of it happen - they only found out when the thieving tenants concerned had gone (of course -if they had listened to my suspicions earlier about the size of their electric bill...............!).

Echo the thoughts others expressed re checking. Electricians cost - but wonder if you could put an appeal in the local paper for an electrician to help out a charity and explain what is required (or, on the other hand, threaten the brothel that that is what you will do if they dont co-operate .... no, on t'other hand, safer to just go straight to the local Press) and - once you have had yr checks done one way and t'other and, assuming brothel owes the charity money, hint you will go to the Press and expose them if they dont pay up - but if they do, then you are prepared to "live and let live".

Or - now heck why didnt I think of that in first place - get the brothel shut. End of problem. Throw every bit of officialdom at their heads you can find - the local Council (are they paying business rates? - bet theyre not), fuel company, waterboard, Inland Revenue (are they paying their taxes - bet theyre not), neighbours going off to local councillors to complain theyre lowering the tone off the neighbourhood. Officialdom as I call it has a lot of ways available to "make life a misery". It works! Be a bit careful to do it subtly - dont let it get traced back to the charity - as the people running some brothels are not exactly sensitive, law-abiding souls!

Terrylw1

Hi,

The comments over your boss are correct, don't pay for whats not yours - youre not that kind of charity surely! I can easily understand that your boss has had enough of all the hassle though but unless you sort it, it will continue and other people could be benefitting from your help.

The electrician route is best as turning off everything has not worked due to communal areas.

Don't go down the de-enegisation route, if you turn off next doors you could end up in a legal dispute with them. No supplier would want to authorise that kind of job.

On the point of trace jobs, GLR, there is no legal obligation on suppliers to do that so most won't, YE just continued to follow an old practice which was good news for the customer. Most haven't done that since splitting with their meter operators. However, if flashnazia is in the YE region, they still do that job for Npower and I think other Suppliers if the supplier is willing to do it (remembering that most stopped years ago so may not be aware that the local Meter Operator will do them since it's the local MO's were the ones to pull the plug on these practices). I too have been involved in these things and mixed up wiring dispuites can often be big problems to bill since it's impossible to prove who's used what on shared systems.

furndire

I have just been reading this post with interest, as it has just reminded me of something that happend to us several years ago, when we first started to run a business.
We had an idea that our electric bills were a bit high, so we turned everything off, found the meter was still running, so before we left one Saturday night dropped the main switch when we left. You can imagine on the Monday morning who we had the waiting for us the next morning, the landlord, asking us what was wrong with the electric. I quite innocently said I haven't a clue, but how did he know that our electric was off. He was running his freezers off our electric, and had been doing for the past 6 months.
So, when possible, pulling the main fuse when you leave at night is the best way of getting a reaction.

Terrylw1

Hey Furndire, you are one of the many. I dealt with an old couple a few years back who had a meter that ran up over a grand in a couple of months for no apparent reason. After a heck of a lot of investigation it turned out a builder doing work next door had done it while they were on their hols and never said anything...I wonder why??? Well he didn't get away with it and was landed with a large bill in his companies name a week later :-)

I wonder with this post whether the building was ever altered and the landlord saved a few quid not bothering to change the wiring???