Illegal Utility Bills: Expert Suggested How Not to Overpay in Winter.

Ukrainians Will Be Flooded with Unfair Bills in Winter, - Consumer Union

Chairman of the Union of Consumers of Public Utilities Oleg Popenko warned that Ukrainians would be flooded with unfair bills in winter. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

The issue of utility bills is becoming increasingly acute for the population. Earlier, Popenko did not rule out that in the fall parliament might face the necessity to consider the issue of raising the tariff on gas, gas distribution, and heat. At present, he drew the attention of Ukrainians to the intricacies of the functioning of the housing and utilities system, mentioning the accrual of unjust debts to citizens.

At the same Time, he spoke of specific cases of unlawful charges for utilities in Ukraine. According to him, in Kharkiv last year, residents were unlawfully charged in their bills for heating network maintenance, although such a decision should only be made at general residents' meetings. In Kupyansk, residents received double bills for electricity for the period of occupation - from the occupation authorities and the local oblenergo. Popenko claims that such violations are widespread across the country - there are hundreds to thousands throughout Ukraine.

In particular, in Kryvyi Rih, residents of a destroyed house received bills from DTEK for electricity. "And there are also semi-legal bills. And so they draw huge debts for heat," Popenko emphasized.

He also cited an example from Kyiv, where a resident was charged 52 thousand hryvnias for heating, "just because KP KTE found such a legal possibility." The situation was rectified only after the expert's intervention and the attraction of public attention, they made a recalculation.

The expert highlighted the widespread problem of the coolant temperature not matching the weather conditions. Sometimes, during warm weather, the radiators are too hot, causing heating bills to unreasonably double.

Such problems are common, but consumers have virtually no effective ways to solve them.

"An apartment building is joint ownership of the apartment owners, and all the losses in the building are your problems. If you have excessively hot radiators, then again you cannot complain about them to KP KTE or somewhere else, because they do not control the coolant temperature and its regulation in an apartment building," Popenko explained.

According to him, fighting excessively hot radiators and, accordingly, huge bills can only be done independently. For instance, manually using a valve, you can decrease or increase the heat supply to the house.

In addition to this, you can install weather-regulated devices that automatically adjust the heat supply to the house according to the temperature outside.