By CHRIS DANIELS consumer reporter
A family with three preschoolers had their power cut off by Mercury Energy - despite not having an account with the company.
Mercury has admitted it was wrong and has vowed to prevent any repeat of the eight-hour blackout for the Howick family, who buy their power from Mercury's competitor, Meridian Energy.
Lawrence Gorman, who took his custom away from Mercury last August, says he is not behind in any of his power bills.
Although he has been living in the house since December, Mercury decided the home was vacant, and without even knocking on the door to see if anyone was home, cut off the power on Friday morning.
The household had to do without power most of the day. Only a note was left in the letterbox, saying the house was empty so electricity had been disconnected.
"The power box is right by the bathroom window, which was open. It was obvious there were people home," said Mr Gorman. "There were small babies in the house. We couldn't even use the phone."
The previous occupants of the Gormans' house were Mercury customers. Meridian had told Mercury the Gormans were moving in, but despite this it was still listed in Mercury's records as vacant.
Mercury's general manager (retail), Kristen Paterson, said Meridian had sent it a file giving details of house-shifts by Meridian customers, including Mr Gorman's correct details.
But parts of the file were incomplete, so Mercury did nothing with it while waiting for more information from Meridian.
"Obviously, that is not good enough. We are reviewing the whole process so any information immediately goes onto our system so that can't happen again," said Kristen Paterson.
"We were disappointed that happened. We don't want to inconvenience customers, whether they are ours or not.
"In the new environment, with customers switching, we lose some, we win some. We win them from other companies like Meridian, so it's in everybody's interests to make this work as smoothly as possible."
Kristen Paterson said it was normal practice for the contractor disconnecting a house to knock on the door and check if anyone was home.
"In this case the person did check the system. Normal process is they do knock on the door and talk to people, so we are investigating that, but certainly we are tightening up on the whole process.
"We are certainly sorry his family went through this. We are working with Meridian to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Kristen Paterson said she believed it was the first time such a disconnection had happened.
But Meridian spokesman Alan Seay said "these sorts of issues have happened elsewhere."
"It is an issue of companies communicating with each other effectively. It's an industry-wide problem."
Protocols had been set up to deal with people switching companies, but these were not binding, said Mr Seay. Some companies followed them, others did not.
"Inevitably you get the occasional case where someone might get their power cut off."
Some 60,000 customers had switched firms since the electricity market was opened up; 30,000 had gone to Meridian.
Mr Seay said the "incumbent suppliers" were not always cooperative when a customer switched to another company. However, things had improved a lot in the past six months.
Supplier's rival cuts off family
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