Annette Carr said the freshly built, three-bedroom unit was completed and sold this month.

Yet despite having no occupants before October, Ms Carr is expected to pay close to $800 for electricity she didn’t use. 

Ms Carr said she was ropeable. 

“The bill said it was estimated,” Ms Carr said. “They didn’t even read the metre.” 

The Wagga accountant shared her fury after she was informed she would be required to pay $790.63 for the last quarter – ending September 22. 

It comes amid a shock-wave of power bill hikes being felt across the Riverina and follows a call for the re-regulation of power, earlier this month.

Some residents have felt the sting of an almost 20 per cent rise in their bills, when compared to this time last year, according to Fairfax Media. 

An investigation into Ms Carr’s bill revealed Origin had used the average usage of a three-bedroom dwelling to “estimate” the bill. 

But Ms Carr said it was more than double what it should have been. 

Working as an accountant for a building business, she said average costs for “plugging a power drill into a wall” was less than $300. 

She said she acknowledged she would have to pay for the electricity the builders used but she said heating was not included. 

“Even $280 seems pretty excessive to plug tools into sockets,” Ms Carr said. 

“We pay that … we don’t pay this.”  

When the bill was questioned, Ms Carr said Origin offered to have the metre read for a fee of $93, a price she described as “disgusting”. 

“We’ve got family friends who had their bills estimated too,” Ms Carr said. “They said it was outrageous.”

An Origin spokesperson said it expected network companies to provide them with timely and accurate reads. 

“As an energy retailer, Origin does not read meters,” they said. “We do work with customers and network companies to try and resolve issues when they occur.”

The very same issue sparked a heated debate in 2015 and triggered an Ombudsman’s investigation into Essential Energy’s meter reading activities across Wagga.

In a statement, Essential Energy said the reading of more than 500,000 meters across NSW was outsourced to regularly-audited contractors in 2015.

It said its estimated meter reads were generally performed when officers could not safely access electricity meters.

The NSW Energy and Water Ombudsman in 2016 identified that Essential Energy was carrying out actual meter reads at over 90 per cent of customer's properties.

In a statement, the ombudsman said energy retailers were required to make “best endeavours to ensure meter reads were conducted at least once a year”.