Why We Should Scrutinize Our Meralco Bills

I've often been amazed by our electric bill, which makes me feel like I might have an entire barangay surreptitiously connected to my meter or something. Last summer, for instance, T and the kids were all in the U.S. for a month. So I decided to "minimize my carbon footprint." At the end of a month of April's heat and darkness, our bill was still over Php 30k.

Here's a classic story of a guy with a high electric bill who should have bothered to look into it, from Agence France Presse:

AMSTETTEN, Austria (AFP) — A former tenant in Austria's "house of horrors" ... could have pointed to the secret dungeon where a woman was held as a sex slave by her father for 24 years, in an interview published Friday.

Sepp Leitner told the daily Die Presse he had come eerily close to discovering the windowless prison a decade ago. Leitner lived for four years in a small flat on the ground floor immediately above the cellar in the 1990s. He said he could never understand why his electricity bill was so high, considering he was frequently absent and did not even have a washing machine.

Leitner only realised this month after the case emerged that he was paying the utility costs for the underground prison as well, which had an elaborate security system installed by owner Josef Fritzl, a former electrician.

"If I'd been a bit more persistent and not let it go until the mystery of the high electricity consumption had been resolved, perhaps we'd have found out about the dungeon earlier," Leitner said.

This month, Ty, Annika and Athens are all in Oz with their grandparents. Only T and I are home, but she leaves for a week of diving in Tubbataha on Sunday, while I hold the proverbial fort. With the lights and the aircon shut off...