Getting a free Liander smart meter installed ended up costing me more than 2000 euro
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I am obviously not associated with Liander BV, Dynniq or Nuon. I registered this domain and created this page to possibly save you from losing thousands of euros, just so these companies can save a few euros by automating away some of their employees.
Promises of saving money, not having to respond to letters asking for your current energy consumption, or randomly letting strangers into your house probably sounds like an opportunity you should jump on. However my experiance was quite different and I now feel you should become aware of the risks you are getting yourself into.
Your energy-costs don't change if you don't change your energy consumption. The only thing that changes is that they are better informed of when you use more or less power, which will give you a more accurate energy bills. This also means your bill will go down in the summer and go back up in the winter. At the end of the year, you pay the same.
However, so is 5 days without gas and warm water when their sub-contractor messes up, claims it never happened, and if it did, it was like that all along and then leave you with the bill to re-route your gas-lines around your whole apartment.
However, you actually do not have to let them in. As long as you fill in the paper-work when they request you to, they have no business in your apartment.
The contractor who will visit you for the installation does not work for Liander. They outsourced it to what i expect was the lowest bidder. The person who destroyed my gas-pipes came from a company called Dynniq. He arrived at 15.45 and i was his 8th customer this day.
If you subtract his travelling between these jobs, that means he spent and average of less than 45 minutes replacing both a gas and electricity-meters per customer. Under such time constrictions you do not do your best work and mistakes are made.
In my apartment the representative from Dynniq was pushing the old fragile copper pipe back and forward while connecting the new gas meter, which most likely broke more than one soldered joints of the pipe.
Yes, and no. I did call a plumber who did some pressure measurements and did replace the part Dynniq had indicated as leaking. Unfortunately due to the amount of gas leaking Dynniq failed to notice that more solderings had broken during his wrestling-session which ment i also had a gas-leak under the floor that heads out from my apartment, trough the staircase and into my kitchen.
To continue, meaning sawing up my living-room floor and part of the staircase would have taken a lot longer than the on-call plumber i hired to fix the problem had time to do, so my only option was to turn off the gas, pay up for the work done and schedule a new appointment. 163,35 Euro and 1 hour later i had still no gas, and as these autumn months are busy times, it would be 4 days before it could be fixed.
No. The plumber made it very clear that just opening up a tiny part of the floor to fix what we guessed was the last leaking part was not sufficient. The pipes and solderings were old and even his delicate touch might just move the damage further. Sawing up the floor and staircase would be as expensive as routing new pipes from one side of my apartment where the gas comes in, all the way to the otherside where my kitchen is. It might fix it at the same cost (considered that i would need new flooring in my livingroom and staircase) but he would not be able to give me any warranty on the job done.
I agreed this was the best approach even though it would mean i had to have a copper pipe routed around my whole apartment. It would also mean he had to drill through 2 brittle 110 year old walls to get pipe routed there.
This job took 7 hours and set me back another 1790,80 euro + the loss of work as i had to be home the whole day to supervise the plumbers.
Dynniq did not log anything out of the ordinary. They came here, changed the meters and did no remarks that their was a problem. The fact that Dynniq talked to the on-call plumber and explained what was broken is completely omitted from their records.
Since Dynniq had no logs of an issue, if there was an issue it was caused by me or already existing before they came to change the meters (but somehow missed when Dynniq made the pressure tests as it was not logged). I was told i could make a claim on Lianders homepage.
Once more, since Dynniq denies any issues, the claim was dismissed. Having lost about 2000 euros, i urged Liander to take responsability and they said they would look into it but have denied responding back.
Having lost 2000 euros to two companies i am technically not a customer of left a bad taste in my mouth. I contacted Nuon, who i am a customer of, but they largly ignored my complaints. Adding 10 euros damage to publish this story on it's own fancy url could help pushing all three companies to do the right thing, which would be taking responsability for the issues their piecework has caused me.
Their argument is simple: Since the issues is after their meter, it is not their problem, but mine. My counter-argument is as simple. If anything this side of the meter was not their responsability, the should never have touched it in the first place. I can not hit someone with my car, then claim whatever happened outside of my car is not my responability.
I have decided to take them to court, and will keep updating this page as it progresses. My hope it that they simply do what is right and settle the damages, costs and mental frustration these months have caused me. I also hope the understand that if they decide to fuck people over by moving blame to the end-customer, the damages will only get higher once settled in court.
The company i hired to fix the damage measured 6 bars gas presure drop in 3 minutes. That's enough to fill my apartment in a few hours, ever more if it continued for years.
In March 2018 i started hearing sparks and arches from my fusebox so i called an electrician to replace it with a modern fusebox. If i had gas-leak back then, this place would have blown up. Sparks and gas-leaks are not a great combination.
If you ask Liander or Dynniq they would say no, just like the deny that they caused this. In my opinion, if you have an old house with old shitty gas-pipes and Dynniq stresses by you as their 8th customer that day, my answer have to be Yes. It can happen to you.
You have many different options. You can either deny them from replacing the meter at all. Or you can force them to measure for leaks before they change the meter to assure you that you didn't have a leak before they started. Or lastly, since they think they have the right to deny liability, have your own plumber doing all the work on your side of the meter. If i wore to have been that paranoid, i would have saved me >1900 Euro. It might sound weird that you should have to protect yourself like this, but rest assure that Nuon, Liander and Dynniq does not give a damn.
Yes. Please share www.lianderervaring.nl to people you care about that is about to get their meters replaced. This will help protecting them from the same 2-month back-and-forward-hell i have had with Liander, Dynniq and ultimatly Nuon.
Feel free to contact me if you have further questions