The gas company is billing you for the wrong meter. It should be simple to fix. Right? Maybe not.

Russell Paquette has had a problem with his Terasen gas bill for almost a year.

"They keep on taking a meter reading from the wrong residence," he says.

Sounds like something that's pretty easy to fix: read the right meter at the right house.

Russ has a letter from Terasen in august admitting the error saying the gas company over charged him by $431.

But even that letter mixed up the meters. The meter number in the letter is not Russ's it's for a neighbour down the street.

"They are making the same mistake over and over again," he explains.

It continued over the fall, winter and spring. Every time the bill was corrected -- they'd read the wrong meter again.

"And we end up getting a larger and larger bill every month."

After Russ called us, Terasen sent him another letter admitting it's error and again apologizing for the problem. Except for the date at the top and signature at the bottom -- the letter is identical to one he received in August right down to the two period typo at the end of this sentence.

"That tells me that they are really not working on it, that they are just going through the motions right now."

And in the second letter Terasen continued to mix up the meters. By this time the bill was over $900 which Terasen insisted it was correct. When Russ and I went over the numbers we both concluded he owed less. Russ asked the company to look at it yet again. And Terasen found another error in his favour.

Russ knew he owed the gas company something. He stopped paying his bills due to wild ups and downs but he still wasn't sure how much he owed

"I've lost confidence in them that they can figure it out properly," he said.

So Russ proposed a settlement of $781 dollars--what he had calculated he owed Terasen.

The company agreed.

"This is our error and we're very sorry for our mistake and certainly we have apologized to the Paquettes for the inconvenience we have caused them," said Joyce Wagenaar, Terasen Gas' director of corporate communications.

"You just feel like you should you shouldn't have gone through this in the first place and that it should have been resolved a year ago," concludes Paquette.

If you have a problem with Terasen gas that you can't fix contact the BC Utilities Commission.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Chris Olsen