Help! - Reconnection Fees?

[Guest Jodie89]

Hi everyone,

 

My husband & I are in the process of buying our first home (yipee!)

 

The current owners have asked if we want to keep the house phone and internet they have at the moment but the only problem is we need to let them know ASAP as their provider requires a 30 day notice period - but we're not even sure we can get the place yet (waiting on our finances to be approved, contract signed and satisfactory inspections to be completed etc)....

 

We're tempted to just tell them to cancel and we will reconnect when needed, although I've heard reconnection fees are ridiculously high?!

 

Can anyone shed some light on what they've done when moving? And if you've had to reconnect how much it costs?

 

Thank you

[Sallyh]

I am not sure you can avoid reconnection fees even if you change the name over?

 

We have to pay them every time we move, even where we are keeping our same account with our same utility provider. It is a complete con. It is one of the things that compares really unfavourably to the way we do things in the Uk . But we're stuck with it.

[flossybeth]

Like Sally says I think you'd pay reconnection anyway. When we took the lease on this house we were still house-sitting so when the phone people said they would be connecting us on a particular day we drove all the way up from Moana to sit in the house to wait for them to come and connect us (we were told anytime from 8am) my husband got a text at around 6pm to say we'd been connected - all done remotely! So goodness knows quite what we paid the reconnection fee for since it would appear that we weren't disconnected in the first place....

 

So I think you can probably tell the other people to go ahead and cancel their account.

[Sallyh]

probably not a good idea to inherit someone else's account at arms length anyway. Get your own, and maintain your own payment history with them. We had one instance last year where we had to ask for an extension on our electricity bill because it was so high. They approved it straight away. I questioned it, and made sure we weren't going to pay any extra interest and just got a plain and simple answer back that our history with them was perfect and there was no problem, and no extra charge.