Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in Connecticut
When we moved into the house we are renting we called to put the utilities in my husband's name. They kept asking us "is it apt A or B (meter A or B)?" We moved into a brand new single-family home so we weren't sure what they were talking about. Our landlord was in Brazil at the time so we checked with the landlord's (then) fiance, as well as the real estate agent, and they both told us Meter A.
To make matters more confusing, apparently this house used to be occupied by the landlord when it was a two-family. He then rebuilt it to be a single-family home.
The landlord moved into the two-family home (that he also owns) behind our home. I'm not sure if that house was pre-existing and then remodeled; or if it was brand new. Either way, it seems that the address of that home is a "new address" as far as the post office is concerned. And although the address of his home is Wallace Street, the landlord continued to use OUR address of Nelson Street. This means that he never notified the utility company of his new residence.
So, since we've been here we have been paying our monthly bill as usual. Then a few months ago, out of the blue, we get a notification about owing about $1300 and the payment plan we "agreed" to. In trying to find out what this meant, we discovered that our landlord felt his bills were too high and asked somebody to come out and look into it (completely unbeknownst to us). Apparently this "investigation" led to the discovery that he had been paying our meter, and we had been paying his meter.
As a result, he took it upon himself (again, still unbeknownst to us) to make an agreement as to what WE would pay as a result of the mix-up.
We had no idea any of this was going on, nor were we ever included on the investigation, or ever informed there was a problem to begin with.
Had we been billed correctly from the start, we would have seen that our bills were higher, and therefore we would have likely used less heat; air conditioning, etc.
So the bottom line is, do we just have to pay or do we have any recourse due to the fact we were never made aware of the error that we had nothing to do with?
They are sending us to collections at this point!
1 Answer from Attorneys
You didn't mention what your lease says about the utility bills. Nevertheless, if you think you are paying for service that your landlord is using, then you need to resolve it with the landlord.
Errors are only important if they cost you something worth bickering over.
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