Rain rain go away

We drove past the house on Sunday to see if the asbestos removal had begun and unfortunately it hadn’t. The demolition start was pushed out to the following week of the 11th and of course it had to rain for two days straight! At the same time we tried to follow up with our Gas retailer “Energy Australia” as to whether the gas had been disconnected at the street – big mistake, they were going to follow up with Jemena and get back to us, which they never did, so on the second phone call a couple of days later we were told that there was a huge email trail and that they would follow up again with Jemena as their system was telling them that only the meter had been removed.

In the end we called Jemena directly to find that they had no correspondence between them and “Energy Australia”, so who knows where EA have been sending their emails too and they had recorded it as a street disconnection. They told us that they would be confirming this with the technician that performed the work and would ring us back. Yes we’ve heard this before, so a couple of days later and no call back, we rang them again and they’ve told us that the street disconnection has definitely occurred. I guess we will see when the excavation machines come in and hit a pipe.

We started shopping around for a new electricity provider after Ausgrid issued a new NMI for our home, this was a nightmare as well, with sites like “iselect” having out-of-date information – deals that no longer exist and incorrect connection fee amounts, in the end we used the government site: www.energymadeeasy.gov.au to find the cheapest deal for our new “Smart Meter” that hadn’t been installed yet, only to find that some energy retailers don’t actually perform new connections and that you need to go with a retailer that can set you up and then switch across. So we’ve gone back to Origin on a Flexichoice plan (no lock in contract or exit fees) that we can then switch from into a better plan.