Found out yesterday that NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection (“DEP”) contracts Con Edison (our power & gas company) for water meter readings. Just wish I knew that before I told the guy I only receive gas & electric through ConEd. Much like the electricity, the water readings have been estimated for more than a year & I blew this month’s chance of fixing that.

Placed a “quick” (~10 min on hold and 10 minutes with an operator) call over to the DEP in order to give them a reading & found out that the previous owner is still listed as the billing contact. Not only that, but the DEP insists on sending someone out to inspect the meter. Why? since they haven’t been able to read the meter for so long, the meter must be broken. I’m told that an inspector will arrive between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. in a month and a half (which was the earliest appointment) and nothing further can be done until then.

Figuring that the previous owner wasn’t very likely to pay my water and sewer bills for me, I needed to find out how to get these paid. Enter NYC.gov. Looking back through the posts here, NYC.gov has provided valuable information, a way of cutting out hours of hold & transfer times with NYC dept. operators and now, a way for me to pay my bills online.

NYC Serv — the New York On-Line Payment Service (part of the NYC Dept of Finance?): Pay anything from parking tickets, to water charges, to EDC violations from home. Only thing missing was the account number for the water charges. Phone the DEP again to get this information and to have the paperwork sent out to change billing gave me the account numbers needed to make a payment.

Overall, not too bad in terms of finding the information I needed. As a bonus, the details for a Residential Water Survey program, which is a free leak survey for NYC’s residential water and sewer customers, were located on a page I was reading anyway. If I qualify, water-saving shower heads, water-savers for toilets and faucet aerators may be installed for me (not entirely sure of the equipment charges — yet).  Update: Scratch that, I don’t meet the requirements just yet.