I have bad gas

S

Stop Laughing

New Member
Yeah, my gas really stinks... the gas company, Nicor, that is. We paid the bill ahead awhile ago and I guess kinda forgot about it. Anyways, we didn't get any urgent bills from them and one day we found a disconnect warning in our bushes with a different address on it (9881, our house is 9802) and thought it wasn't for us since it was just laying in the bushes and didn't have our address on it. We obviously overestimated them. The next day (two weeks earlier from today, a Thursday) I woke up to a very unpleasant ice cold shower. We called them up immediately and got the bill paid (it got to about $300, but we've had it higher without being disconnected before) after going through their asinine automatic phone system. It makes me appreciate the power company's touch tone system, cause the word recognition thing Nicor uses doesn't understand a damn thing and rerouted us to the beginning 3 times before we got through. Then we had to go through it all again (even more asinine, after going through its options, all it did was give us a different phone number to call and go through its own automatic phone service) to get turned back on and schedule someone to relight our pilot lights. The soonest they said was available was Tuesday, and we were upset about it, but since that was the soonest they had, we had no choice but to take it. It didn't end there, though, they said they would come anytime that day between 7AM and midnight. WTF? Even the cable company gives a 4 hour window, why is theirs 17 hours? So I took the day off of work, woke up early in hope that it'd be over with quick, and I waited... and waited... and waited... Eventually my brother gets home from school at 3, we call them to find out what's going on and they still said we're scheduled for sometime before midnight. A couple of hours later my mother gets home from work, we ate dinner, watched TV, and it's getting later and later. We called again, same message. It's getting hard for me to even stay awake any longer at this point. Midnight rolls around, and still nothing. No knock on the door, no phone call, and it's after business hours so they're only taking emergency calls. We called their emergency line and they gave us an attitude for calling them and it not being an emergency. I was extremely pissed off at this point. I screamed at them, I gave up a day of work and waited the entire 17 hours for them and they don't so much as even call to let us know they're not coming? The next morning I called them and scheduled a relight after work, and they actually showed up on time, and were done in 15 minutes. We sent them an E-mail complaint which they clearly ignored based on their condescending reply. We've also registered the complaint with the CUB (citizens utility board) but I don't think much will happen with that. I know we missed paying for a while, but that's no excuse for the shitty service they gave us.

Sorry, I needed to vent, since my furnace wasn't able to for nearly a week.
 
Jeees..How big a bill did you have through the summer?
I have gas in this house and have had it in others and over the summer it rarely is over the minimum, a little less then 10 bucks a month...
 
highwayman said:
Jeees..How big a bill did you have through the summer?
I have gas in this house and have had it in others and over the summer it rarely is over the minimum, a little less then 10 bucks a month...
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Maybe the question isn't how big the monthly bill is but how long it wasn't paid for?
 
SL: You don't have push button ignitors for your pilot lights? I think my mom forgot to turn the fireplace pilot out this summer...I dunno about the furnance...I don't look at that on a daily basis :lloyd: but anyway, we usually turn them out for the summer and relight them ourselves in the fall.
 
I was so looking forward to some nice fart talk. Oh well.

That sucks about the gas company though. Were your bills getting mailed to your house, or were they just overlooked or what?
 
Sounds like they were being mailed to the wrong address and left in the bushes.... maybe they're on a Moses kick? :hmm:
 
Nixy said:
SL: You don't have push button ignitors for your pilot lights? I think my mom forgot to turn the fireplace pilot out this summer...I dunno about the furnance...I don't look at that on a daily basis :lloyd: but anyway, we usually turn them out for the summer and relight them ourselves in the fall.
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Um ... you're never supposed to put out a pilot light.
 
Sure you can so long as you turn off the gas... depends on the type of boiler you have. My gas shuts off automatically if my pilot light goes out, but it stays on all the time usually cos I use it for both central heating and water heating. I just switch off the central heating circuit in the summer. I haven't switched it back on yet cos it's not cold enough.
 
Not always, we used to have gas heating and electric water heating. And another time we had a solid fuel furnace for heating, electric water heating and gas for cooking. :eek:
 
More like the goddam ash.... if you didn't bank it up every night it used to go out and then in the morning you had to clean it all out and relight it and then it took ages before it got warm... But that was better than having an open fire in the living room and no heating upstairs like when I was a kid... I remember living in a bungalow in the country where all the pipes froze in the winter. We couldn't have a bath and you couldn't flush the loo so there was a bucket of water beside it. I think I was 5 at the time. :(

Boy am I glad we don't use coal anymore...
 
It's all gas here: stove, oven (doesn't work but still has a pilot), water heater and furnace. The dryer was gas too, but it was capped so no gas is going through. And Nixy, they have to come out to relight the pilots when the gas turns on, otherwise you've got a volatile situation there, to say the least. The only thing I really missed was the hot water, cold showers suck!
 
Professur said:
Usually a gaz furnace also means a gas water heater.
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Ok fine, I dunno if we turn off the pilot in the furnance...but I know we usually turn off the pilot in the fireplace and when we had the trailer we'd light the pilor every weekend for the furnance (that was propane).
 
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