Let there be light! Adventures in paying for electricity

Here in Beijing Electricity and gas for heating your house works on a prepaid model. You buy credit points in advance and load them into a smartcard then you come home and you charge your meter in your house with the card. If you don't do this in time your electricity and gas will get shut off as soon as you run out of credit. On the left is the picture of the meter.

Well, learning that little bit of information cost me a few trips to bank, post office, McDonalds and some mental anguish. My next door neighbors had it worse. On a Saturday afternoon their power went off and that is when they started learning about all of this.

Before my roommate went on vacation she showed me the gas and electricity cards and kind of explained what I had to do. But since she also had not done it herself, her instructions, I found out later, were very incomplete. I kept checking the electricity (in the hallway by the elevators) and gas meters (in our kitchen) and delaying the eventual facing of the challenge to recharge them.

One Saturday night I met my neighbors, two Italian university students, in hallway as they were struggling to figure out which electricity meter belonged to them. Then they explained how their power went out and they had to go find out how to recharge the card. But after they put the recharged card into the meter they still did not get power. If your meter goes to zero you have to press another little black button somewhere else to reset it. But none of us know that then. So the poor kids had no power all weekend long. That scared me so that very same night at 1:00AM I went to McDonalds to use a special ATM machine to charge my card. But unfortunately all the writings on the machine were in Chinese. I was able to navigate around by just guessing what the icons meant but that didn't get me very far. Eventually I had to ask someone to help me read. But out of all people I picked a student that also had not done this before and was not as helpful as I hoped. Eventually he said that the machine cannot do it and that I have to do a bank. At this point my electricity was down to 8 points. So I shut off everything and tried to stretch the remaining credits until Monday when I could get help form people at work. It was a very cold night and I shivered all night long.

On Monday I asked my team what was the process. But most of them didn't know. People that live in their parents' house are too spoiled and have never done this. And people that have maids also never do it. Eventually I found one coworker that knew and he took me to a back machine at the bottom of our building to recharge the card. The bank machines have both English and Chinese menu. But the English one has only the basic options and does not give you the full menu of how to pay for gas and electricity. So I learned and memorized the sequence of the buttons that I have to press to recharge the card. Once the card was charged I came back home and put it inside the meter and no one beholds it worked. I had never appreciated having electricity until I was 1 hour away from not having it. One disaster averted, next problem was gas. I shifted all house heating to electricity to conserve gas.

To pay for gas you have to go to the post office. I found that out after going to 2 banks. Apparently a post office was supposed to be close to my house so I tried walking in that direction several times but I never saw it because I did not go far enough. When I really got desperate, I was down to 0.2 units of gas, I got better direction and this time walked far enough to find the place. I got a ticket and went to the counter and buy 500RMB (65$) of gas. They teller said that he could not accept bank card and I had to pay cash. Fortunately I was prepared for it so I gave him the money. And he charged my card with 260 cubic meter of gas.

Here is a picture of me feeling very accomplished and showing off the receipt.

Then I came back home and put the smart card in the gas meter and recharged it. Now we had gas. What a great luxury.

Some reflections:

In the prior 3 weeks I used 70 cubic meters of gas. That was about 100RMB for just one person. That is actually very expensive because average monthly salary of a lot of people is about 1000-1500RMB. So paying 10% of their monthly income on just this one utility is not trivial. My personal consumption is probably too high. But still, gas is expensive. Now I better understand why people still burn coal in the city for heating. In the huton area, the courtyard ghettoes, you commonly see coal sellers that carry coal bricks on the back of their bicycle and go from house to house and refill the stock piles of round coal bricks.

Another reason for prepaid model is that there is good credit system here. So it is hard for banks and utility companies to trust you that you will pay your bills. I think the next logical step for them is to enable recharging your card over internet. The smartcard system is already sophisticated enough that they can easily do this.

The reason I got some wrong directions is that there are 4 gas companies in Beijing. Some have a relationship with a bank and some with post office. So you have to know which one you are using and that determines where you have to go to pay. This lack of centralized backend system is very common. Large companies like China Mobile are really made up of many smaller companies with different systems and processes all operating under a common brand. Also the central power and decision making ability in these large companies is distributed geographically. There is no such thing as having a deal with China Mobile. You have to have a deal with each of the provincial branch offices separately.