I have been trying to re-establish my service for the past 6 days. Missed a day of work to sit at home and wait ALL DAY for a representative to show up. No one ever did. I called again the next morning and was schedule for them to show up that evening so I left work 15 minutes prior to my work schedule (5pm) since I work only 15-20 minutes from home, was home by 5pm. No one once again showed up. I called the next morning and I was told a representetive was at my house at 5:58pm but no one was home. I aske if they nocked on the door or rang the door bell and there answer was that there was no vehicle on the driveway. I thought garages were mostly used to park your cars inside not leave them on the driveway.

Came out to replace my meter. No problem just everyday meter change out program. No notice just changed it and left note to call to get gas turned back on. When I called they indicated that I must commit to stay at home all day for them to put me on the schedule. No time frame, no call before coming no service in any way.

At about 1:30 PM, 11/13/07, a Centerpoint Energy contractor by the name of Jeff arrived to do the 'six point check' on our furnace. In past years I had gone through our local heating and cooling company, but this year decided to go with Centerpoint to save money and spread out the payments on my monthly gas bill.
This man was not in the house more than 15 minutes and discovered a crack in the heat exchanger which followed with the unit being red- tagging and turned off our gas. I called my husband who, in turn, called a contractor he knew from his years in home building. My husband simply began the conversation, 'Centerpoint is at my home' and the man on the other end of the phone interjected , 'and they red-tagged you'. Apparently, Centerpoint has a reputation of red-tagging for reasons unknown to me.
What angers me is that I will still be charged $98.50 for the six-point check and cleaning which wasn't done at all. He looked for a crack, found it and this is what I am being charged for. Seems a bit scammish to me. Seems to me I would be given a break since the unit was not cleaned, etc. By the way, none of us have been waking up or suffering with headaches and the furnace has been running for at least a month. We also have a lovebird right outside the room which contains the furnace and it hasn't dropped dead.
I called our local heating and cooling company and they remarked by stating that Centerpoint is a bit over cautious. At one of their other customers home whose furnace was cleaned and checked, noticed fingerprints on the mans furnace. The contractor asked if someone had been out to see the unit, the man said yes and that it was Centerpoint Energy one week earlier. Well, apparently his furnace was not cleaned as Centerpoint said they would do and they were only in the man's home for about 15 minutes. My local company will spend about 1 and1/2 hours on the furnace. Wish I would have spent the extra $30 and gone with my local company. Live and learn.

On 09/04/2007, I found a representative from Centerpoint energy in my driveway who informed me that he was here to disconnect my gas service. The bill was being sent to another one of my properties on the other side of the country and I never realized that it was missing when the mail stopped being forwarded. To this date, I have yet to have a single call or a Voice Mail from Centerpoint to the phone number listed on my account to inform me that my service was about to be disconnected. Their answer to this issue was: well, our automated system calls customers but we don't leave a message or bother checking if the calls ever reached you... Seems to me like the system's only designed to deal with intentionally delinquent customers and not to resolve billing issues as is the case here. The reason I am contacting you to place an official complaint is twofold:

1. Monopoly practices (failure to reach a customer to try and resolve issues): Not leaving a phone message (while disconnect notices are being sent to an incorrect address) does not give a delinquent customer a way to know there is an issue with their account and to resolve it. My unchecked payment history should have been a good reason to suspect there was an issue somewhere... but when you are the only company around, you don't have to deal with customers the way others do, I guess!

2. Racketeering (They want to charge me $70 dollars to turn the gas valve back on). This simply ridiculous!!! Mind you that I owe them a measly $98 and that until 04/07, I made regular payments.

PS: At this point in time, I believe the only gas powered appliance in my house is the water heater, which I will be replacing with an electric one so I no longer have to use the ONLY gas providing utility company. I also want to make sure that you are aware f what appears to be monopolistic abuse from Centerpoint energy. This is so ridiculous and could have been avoided had the company bothered to have a live employee call me on the number they had on record, which seems like proper business practice.