Disconnected from the Natural Gas Co: My Thoughts. Anybody else doing this / done it?

Wanted to share this just in case others are thinking about doing this:

This has been our first season burning wood and we really enjoyed it. We only ran our Natural Gas forced air furnace one day after installing the stove (we were lazy for one day!). Our NG provider does a Actual/Estimate billing system (they don't have the cellular meters here yet) so one month our bill would be $8 (connection fee) and then the next month it would be their "estimate" which was around $100!! I was set up on auto pay out of my bank account, so they were happy to take my $100 and hold onto it for a few months and pay it back to me in bill credits. Since we have a electric stove and electric hot water heater, my wife concluded that we should shut the NG service off and save the $8--$10 per month over the summer and beyond as we will go 100% wood heat again next winter.

I called up the NG provider (Nicor) and they said "what about your stove? what about your hot water heater? -- OK we will disconnect you, but if you want to come back to us you will have to pay the monthly connection fee for all the months you weren't connected." I guess this is how they keep people from disconnecting during the summer and reconnecting going into the winter. I began to think twice but my wife said smartly, "better us to keep that money than pay them every month on the chance we might use some gas. If we need to reconnect, it will be the same difference!" Good logic to me!

I was kinda shocked that they didn't try harder to keep me as a customer. I didn't get transfered to the "win back department" nor was I offered a special "wood heater discount plan." I asked the operator if I sold my house and the new owner wanted to reconnect, would they have to pay all the back months charges and she said "no". So, maybe if I do need to reconnect for some reason, I'll just sign up in my mother in-law's name as though she bought the house to save the charges!

My furnace is old, inefficient, and unreliable (one of the main reasons we got the wood stove). Our air conditioner is also old and may not make it though the summer. I might just get a new central AC and electric heat pump and forget about gas forever!

I guess our situation is a little different than most. We have two dogs so we don't travel much. If we did travel we could get some electric heaters as another poster mentioned. It's just me and my wife in the house so we aren't heating water for an army. We also keep the temp on the HWH down low to save $$. Our electric bill is around $75/mo. Our NG furnace is flaky. If I leave it set at too low a temp then the fire doesn't engage and the blower just runs (it gets plugged up). Often we would come home to a cold house - same as being away from the wood stove for too long. So, to make the furnace work while we are away I have to set the temp higher which is silly cause we aren't home. My electric HW heater is not very old and our electric glass top Kitchenaid convection oven (which my wife prefers over gas) is only a couple of years old too. How much would I really save buying new gas appliances and running gas lines to those appliances? I would need a flue installed for a HW heater as it is in the garage and the furnace is in the middle of the house.

The Natural Gas co does offer the ability to self report your meter reading through their website on the months that they do the "estimate". But you have to do it on the exact day they say, otherwise it throws the billing system off. Also, if the reading you report is "too low" in their opinion (like zero usage), they think you are not reporting correctly and just estimate you anyway, which results in time calling their customer service to get it sorted out.

Why should I pay $$ to stay hooked-up to a utility that I don't use? $10 per month = $120 a year. Same reason we stopped our garbage pick up. We are recycling a lot and hardly generate any trash so we canceled our trash service at the first of the year. That's another $25/mo bill gone = $300 a year. Also, we sold the TV (its nice and quiet at home now!) and didn't have cable anyway - most do - so thats a $40-50 a month savings ($480-$600 a year). We shut off the home phone at $40 a month so theres another $480 a year saved. Our car is paid for (we just have one). I also switched to DSL at $30 per month instead of the cable model at $60mo so that's another $360 a year saved. We get movies from the library for free instead of paying for Blockbuster or Netflix. As you can tell I'm cheap! Being cheap is a hobby of my wife and mine. We used to blow all kinds of money on all sorts of stuff, but we took a personal finance class and wised up to the consumerism / consumption economy society. Getting rid of the TV has been great as we aren't exposed to ads to tempt us to buy things or TV shows that make us feel like we need to buy things to buy up the the living standard of the people on TV. We also don't subscribe to any magazines or newspapers ($500 a year savings)!

Saving money is one of the other reasons I got a wood stove in the first place. I couldn't make the math work buying a brand new stove, be we found one used on craigslist for $300 (we would have bought a Harmon for $2500 new) and I got 9 feet of SS chimney pipe used for $100. I sourced all the parts I didn't get used from other local suppliers directly. I did the install myself saving another $500-$700 or so in labor and marked up parts from the installer.

Little savings here and there add up over time!