Looking for information in regards to this meter [pics]

Lone Stone

Hello, I have been here a few months ago about a meter on the house i am renting, This is the meter on the side of our house as you can see in the pictures it goes into debt. Now our land lord told us this was just a pay meter when we rented the property when we first moved in we couldnt put more than 5 euro on it at a time, When it runs out of money it goes into debt.

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We rang up the esb they told us there was arrears of some thing like 3000 euro on the account we had his account number , the account is in our land lords name, He's denied this. We were told it was just a pay meter when we rented the property, it goes into debt daily, uses up the power when no one is in the house, when nothing is turned on. When it runs out of credit it goes into debt. Which has to be cleared to before we can get power back etc.

Now we are currently in dispute with our land lord.

Could someone please tell me if this box looks legit , he has had a electrition tampering with it,it is also on the outside of the house. the debt use to show up but not since the electrition.There is another one inside the house which has to be kept topped up also, it goes the power goes, if the one outside goes the power goes.

We cant get any information ourself s as it is in his name.He has since come in to talk to us about it and is now trying tell us we go through 30-60 euro a week in electricity because the esb told him that our storage heater uses up a lot of units, a storage heater we rarely use and have turned of since we moved into the house to save on bills ..we are only in the house 4 days of the week most of the time and even then we do be in college till 6pm most of the time.


We are renting the property so is there any way we can get a statement about the arrears that was on the house, and the amount of units being used ? the landlord isnt giving us this information.

And can you tell me if this meter is a debt/arrears control meter ?
And is it possible for one of these meters to be installed on someones house
with out them being informed about it ?

Davy

Its a token meter, and was most likely installed because of the size of arrears on the account. The one outside is an official esb meter, but did you take pictures of the inside one? Sounds like your landlord had additional one installed.

The token meter can be programmed that it claws back a certain amount each week of the arrears. Be it a fiver or whatever, so if you put €30 into it each week, it will deduct €5 straight away to go towards the arrears so you are helping to clear his debt.

Lone Stone

No i dont have a pic one inside at the moment, but he gave us like 2000 euro of tokens(blue tokens) for the one inside, it doesnt seem to power anything, it just needs to have credit on it to keep the one on the outside working

The meter goes through 30 - 60 euro a week, If there is no credit on it and we put a 5 euro token into the meter it only last's a few hour's. Do these meters also deduct money of each token ? Like we put say 5 euro on it around 7pm its usually gone by 10 am, The land lord some times puts 30 euro in it on a sunday but that only last for two or three days. 30 euro should last how long more than three days i would guess.

We have added up the average amount we put on each 30-60euro week ontop of the money he puts on the meter and its around 1200 - 1400 euro since septemeber and the land lord has told he has put over 900 euro on it himself since septemeber so a total of around 2200 give or take now i dont know a lot about unit usage but there is no way we could go through 30 euro a week let alone 60 euro a week in electricity for a house we are hardly in, so would i be right in assuming that this is not normal power usage ? Because he is tellling us that our unit usage is really high which cant be possible if we are in college all day rarely there more than four days of the week, have no tv, the only thing we use is at most a laptop and a pc , and have the lights on in the house , oven kettle etc .

Davy

The whole thing sounds like a mess. Forget about the meter on the inside, that has nothing to do with the esb. Thats something your landlord put in.

Really you need to get the mprn into your name and account and get rid of the landlord out of the equation and let him sort out the arrears with the esb. Im not sure if they will allow you do this because of the arrears, but im sure they will let you know in the morning when they are online.

Electric Ireland: Carol

Hi Lone Stone

That sounds an unusual situation! Unfortunately as you are not the account holder we would be very limited what information we could give you about the account. What I can say is that the ESB does have what we call token meters and you buy cards in Paypoint outlets with a Power Pay card that has your ESB account number on it. This meter would be in addition to your ordinary meter but we would not have two ESB token meters at the one house.

I hope this information is of some help to you!

Carol

Cookie_Monster

60 quid a week :eek:

That sounds like a total mess and considering the property/rental market I'd simply move.

Priori

Cookie_Monster wrote:

60 quid a week :eek:

That sounds like a total mess and considering the property/rental market I'd simply move.

Totally agree! OP, for all you know (and I would say this might well be the case) you are paying (a lot) extra to cover the debts incurred by some previous tenant, probably in the landlord's name. And now the landlord has been landed in it , and is slyly hoping some 'none-the-wiser' tenants will gradually clear away what he is liable for...

Just my 2 cents. Something similar happened to a friend of mine last year.

Lone Stone

Hi thanks for the replies been away for college this week had no internet, Anyway we decided to move out, he got a list of the esb showing how much money has been spent for electricity , now he keeps telling us we are using this much power which impossible its costing about 10 euro a day to keep power on. Thanks for the replies we think we have been paying of his arrears with the esb when we use the tokens thats why the power last a hour or two he denies this and just keeps saying prove it but we cant because its in his name.

He tried to tell he told us we shouldnt change account to our names at the start of the year because "it would cost you 600 to switch the account over" . He told us he cant get a statement to show how much debt was on the account in september and how much is on it now. So anyway were leaving. Going to leave it in the hands of the prtb thanks for the information.