New York State Electric & Gas [NYSEG] review: overcharged 4

Have been a customer of NYSEG for over 20 years and started having trouble with them about six years ago. I started to notice that my bills went from $70 a month average to over $230 a month. After calls to them, they told me it must be one of my appliances. I had a new stove with energy star rating, and all of my appliances (stove/oven, water heater, clothes dryer, furnace) are gas. No one is home all day and the house is only 1200 s.q ft. We run the pool pump in the summer and would expect a spike then, but this continued on after the summer season.

After consulting NYSEG when my bills started topping out at over $350 a month, they said I would have to pay an electrician to come out and check to see if my eclectic was bad. I thought that was what they did? Well, the prices I got for someone to look was around $250.00 I decided to just pay the bills. Anyway, I would go to the nyseg site and have the funds electronically removed from my checking account. Was never a problem for three years, then one month I noticed the charge did not come out. I put in for it to go again, and again it did not. I called NYSEG they told me it was an insufficient funds issue, which I knew ws not hte case as I had in excess of $600 in the account at the time.

I called my credit union who said that no attempts where made by NYSEG to remove the funds. I verified my account number with NYSEG and said that something was done wrong on their end because my credit union said no attempts came from them to remove funds . I was now not allowed to pay my bill online because of their screw up. They charged me $5.00 to pay by phone and would not waive the fee. The next month I went to pay online again, and was not allowed. Spoke with two different agents who said it was their fault and would get the matter cleared up. NEVER HEARD BACK FORM THEM, STILL HAD TO PAY BY PHONE, CHARGED $5.00.

To date, I don't get bills in the mail, my bills are now around $25.00 a month (what happened there?) and I still msut pay by phone and get billed $5.00 per month for that. They suck and even when I switched companies to NY Energy Cooperative, I still get billed by NYSEG and they often charge line fees in excess of $150.00 per month is my usage is low No recourse as they are the only game in town really. Ca't wait to leave this backwards State, NY is awful and upstate is the worst when it comes to utilities!