8760 warning-pay your bills,don't rely on banks and read reminders!

This story may be of interest. We arrived at our house on Monday and almost at once ,with minimum power being used at the time, fused the system. Electrician came over,checked the meter and said there was nothing wrong with the system-Enel had reduced the power to 200 watts because we hadn't paid the bill.I said this was impossible as all our bills for services were paid by direct debit which had been confirmed by the bank. Anyway went to see bank next day who confirmed having spoken to Enel that the co-ordinates given by Enel to them weren't clear and somehow the debit had not been set up.I of course complained that I was relying on their assurance that the debits were set up but i got nowhere. They said i should have contacted them after getting the reminder letter from Enel but I only got that the day I arrived. The power was restored the next day so we had nearly 2 days without heating and hot water.
Draw your own conclusions.
The only good thing to come out of this is that apparently ( I havent yet checked) you can access your Enel account online,set up a password,view the bill and pay it on-line on Visa. Also, although she said she shouldnt have been able to do this, the lady in the local Enel shop arranged for the bills in future to be sent to me in England.

Category
Cost of living - Utility Services

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 07:47

[quote=Robert;82251]......... although she said she shouldnt have been able to do this, the lady in the local Enel shop arranged for the bills in future to be sent to me in England.[/quote]

ENEL have always sent my bills to my UK address. I pay by direct debit through my Italian bank [and yes - Italian banks do seem to have problems setting up DDs, but once up and running they seem OK]

My last bill was small [only E15], so ENEL haven't taken it from my account but are rolling it onto the next bill.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 10:33

We have all our utilities set up to be paid via our acct at the PostalBank, so I coudln't figure out why we got a notice last summer saying that our service would be cut off if we didn't pay our bill! After carefully checking, I discovered that the phone bill (Telecom) had been paid by the PO in May, and again in July, but for some reason June's payment had NOT been made.

Of coure the PO blamed it on Telecom and Telecom blamed in on the PostalBank, but at least we caught it in time and were able to make an immediate payment to avoid having our phone service cut off, but of course if we'd been out of the country for an extended time it would have been much more complicated.

The lesson learned here was to double check your bank acct online to make sure that the scheduled payments have indeed been made!