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Overcharged Aussies fight back as 'common problem' quadruples bills: '$365 to $1,500'

You could be overcharged for your gas and electricity but there's an easy solution.

Stewart Perrie
·Senior Journalist
Updated ·5-min read
Jayde and Celia talking about their gas bills
Jayde and Celia have opened up about how energy companies calculate your bills and what you need to do to avoid being charged too much. (Source: @jaydesandlant/@celia.gercovich/TikTok)

Australians are being urged to double-check their energy and gas bills as unsuspecting customers are "overcharged" hundreds of dollars. Some providers don't always perform a proper meter reading when they go to your home and will use an estimate instead.

Victorian resident Celia Gercovich recently received her first gas bill after moving into her new property and was shocked when she saw the final amount. She told Yahoo Finance there's no way it should have been that high.

"We've previously been living in units, so we sort of expected things to be a little bit more expensive," she said. "But when that bill came through for 600 and something dollars, I thought, 'Something's not right'."

She called up her provider, Energy Australia, and, after a bit of digging, was told her bill was based on an estimate meter reading.

Gercovich was told to send through a picture of her meter and her bill was halved from $617 to $308 in minutes.

"I've always been someone who if something doesn't seem right, to ring and check, but I know a lot of people don't like doing that," she told Yahoo Finance.

"But I think, when you can have your bill halved, it's very important to make the call and query things."

Do you have a story? Email stew.perrie@yahooinc.com

Jayde ran into the same issue as Gercovich and couldn't believe her eyes when her gas bill was hundreds of dollars more expensive than usual, especially since they stopped using their gas heater. She took a photo of her meter and sent it to her provider and $400 was knocked off the bill.

Other Aussies opened up about how they challenged an estimate reading and got the same result.

"I got a bill for my electricity for $1500, it was an estimate. My bills are usually $300, so I did the photo of the meter and resubmitted my reading, my bill then came down to $365," wrote one person.

"Yep same to us! We always got estimations of $700-800... our entire house is electric and we have solar. Lol when I called it’s $45," added another.

A third said: "This happened to me last week too! It was an estimate, it was for $582, our usual bill is around $125. It’s insane that they estimated we suddenly used…. 5x our usual usage?"

Gercovich said she was lucky she didn't have direct debit enabled, otherwise she would have been considerably out of pocket.

"It makes you realise that manually paying your bills is definitely, for me, a much better option than having it direct debited out of my account without actually seeing the bill," she told Yahoo Finance.

Access is often the reason gas and electricity companies don't get a reading before sending out a bill.

Energy Australia noted this on its website, explaining a meter may not always give the required information at the time of an inspection.

However, the company said a bill will be labelled if it's taken from an estimate and that a proper reading should be performed at the following inspection.

Once they have an official reading, they will be able to work out if you've been overcharged or undercharged. If you're overcharged then you'll get a credit on your next bill.

Gercovich suspected a meter reading wasn't done for her gas bill because she has dogs on her property and that might have spooked the worker.

While she understands that estimate bills are usually corrected at the next round, she said sudden price hikes can really hurt Aussies.

"I think with the cost of living at the moment there would probably be a lot of people very stressed by receiving a bill that's so high," she said.

Money expert Joel Gibson told Yahoo Finance that it's definitely worth being proactive if you receive an estimate bill rather than waiting for it to be corrected later on.

He said estimate readings are a "common problem" because it's hard to know exactly what the estimate is based on. But Gibson urged Aussies to ring their provider if the bill is substantially higher or lower than a previous one.

"I think it's good just to make sure they're getting it right, and whether it's overestimating or underestimating, you don't want to either get a back bill or obviously, you don't want to be overcharged for what you're using," he said.

He has a smart meter installed in his home, which sends his energy company a reading every 15 minutes.

While that sounds like a great feature, Gibson said it comes with a big downside.

"The main issue I see at the moment with smart meters is that people are being moved on to different types of tariffs called Time Of Use tariffs, and some people are being caught out by that not realising and getting a bigger bill because they use energy at certain times of the day," he said.

Both Gibson and Gercovich said energy companies should have a system that flags an estimate bill if it's much higher than usual so that the onus isn't always on the customer to dispute it.

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