France in Focus

Personally I've giving up the hope to ever be able to decode and fully understand my energy bills. Like a Christmas tree with many lights and ornaments. In my little atelier many boxes with capacitors, transistors, integrated circuits and resisitors. I'm afraid that in this case resistance is useless. The promise of the smartmeter Linky was: from now on everything will be much easier for les chers clients. Just as in politics: des promesses non-tenues.

The French consumer organisation "60millionsdeconsommateurs" comes to the rescue of those who started to doubt their own intellectual abilities with this article: Électricité : les pièges des factures mensualisées.

The translated intro from their website.

" Despite using less electricity than last year and making monthly payments of €160, Guy has just received a bill for €811. He's stunned. He's not the only one to have had a shock on receiving his adjustment bill. Similar stories have been piling up since the beginning of the year. It's enough to make you wonder about monthly payments. If you end up with such high bills at the end of the year, could it be a trap? "

Our, just available, last year's leccy bill is about 10% more than the previous year for almost the same kWh but the monthly prelevement demanded, despite EDF reimbursing 250€, is almost twice that of a year ago.

We Always refuse monthly payments, yearly bill is under 1000€.

We had another letter from EDF today trying to tell me what a good idea it would be for me to let them estimate my bills so they can use my money and then tidy up the loose ends at the end of the year. I don't really see what's in it for me so I will continue to pay manually every two months for price relating to my actual metered usage, not some skewed algorhythm.