When Tamara Shaw checked her hourly power usage on the Toronto Hydro website — tracking her daily consumption is a cost-cutting trick — she was boggled by her apparent usage in the days that followed Toronto’s devastating ice storm.

It seemed she was being charged to burn candles.

Toronto’s widespread power outage blackened Shaw’s condominium in the Bathurst St. and Hwy. 401 area on Dec. 22 and much of Dec. 23.

Nonetheless, when she signed into Toronto Hydro’s time-of-use (TOU) tracker — an online service that shows customers their power consumption by the hour — it showed use at times when there had been no supply.

“I expected it to be nothing, because there was no power,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Tanya Bruckmueller, spokesperson for Toronto Hydro, says confusion about charges shown on the TOU system is due to a glitch that makes it wrongly appear as though customers are being charged during a blackout.

The hiccup occurs because the billing system doesn’t effectively process days when no power is used. That results in a recalibration of sorts: when power comes back after an outage, it will take the usage from the day the power resumed and spread it out over the time period since the last reading — that is, before the blackout.

For example, if the power goes out Sunday night and comes back Thursday, power used on Thursday will be spread out over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, because the system has to show daily usage.

“It doesn’t know when you used it, it just knows that you should have had a reading every day,” Bruckmueller said. “Consumption will be correct; the days will be off and wonky.”

Further complicating the situation is which rate the redistributed usage will fall into: off-peak (the cheapest), mid-peak or on-peak (most expensive).

On the TOU, the amount used will be displayed as equally dispersed into each rate, but that will not be how the customer is billed.

That’s because the TOU portal is not a billing system, but rather a tool for customers to see estimates of their power usage.

What will be accurate — “and always be accurate” Bruckmueller said — is the meter reading, which has a detailed record of when power was used. That information then feeds directly into the billing system.

“The meter knows that nothing was consumed on (days there was a black out). The time-of-use portal isn’t able to figure out how to do that, so until it gets another reading, it just does wonky things.”

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She assures customers they will not be charged for power they did not consume.

Customers, therefore, do not have to contact Toronto Hydro to alter their bill, which — because it takes its data from the meter — will only reflect the power that was used. But Bruckmueller said they are welcome to contact the company with further questions.