When the blizzard hit Lubbock at the end of December, it brought snow and ice that stuck around for days. Because of that, electric meters may not have been readable by Lubbock Power and Light meter readers.
Currently, LP&L meters are read by meter readers who have to physically go out and read each and every meter in the city.
“When you’re looking at a storm of this magnitude, with this amount of snowfall on the ground that stays for several days, up to a week, you’re going to have issues in terms of going out there and physically reading meters,” Matt Rose with LP&L said.
Rose said the snow only impacted people whose meters are read at the end of the month.
“Our last cycle to be read in the month of December, which would have been read on December 28th, we were unable to read on that day, because all of those meters were still covered in snow and a lot of those alleys, our trucks could not get down,” Rose said.
Even with snow covering the meters, the bills still need to go out, Rose said.
“So, we have had to estimate the reads for those meters in the last cycle of our month,” Rose said. “So our customers who typically get read at the very end of the month, will have an estimation on their bill for this month.”
“Our meter readers will read those meters and there will be a true up. If they were able to read the meter in November of 2015 but because of the snow storm, they weren’t able to read it in December of 2015, December 2015, will be estimated. And then when they read in January, they will see the entirety of the two months and that will allow us to true it up and so we will get a true reading of every single meter,” Rose said.
Rose said advanced meters, or smart meters, would be beneficial in this case, because they would eliminate the need for people to go out and read each meter.
“What we want our customers to know is that it is the practice of LP&L to read every single one of our customers meters, but there are rare and specific instances where we are unable to read those meters because we don’t have smart meter technology. And in those cases, we have to do an estimation based on previous usage, and it will be trued up the next month,” Rose said.
If you have any questions, you can call LP&L at (806)775-2509.
