This is a rant about my personal experience, so I'm apologizing ahead of time to those people who work for utility companies and actually do a good job.
You know, I've come to the conclusion that Entergy just is not going to run electricity to my new home. The place that I'm renovating never had utilities run to it, but it did have an electric utility pole ready to run wires to. We called the local electric utility, Entergy, to come out and tell us what we needed. They came out, gave us a short list of the Codes we had to maintain when we built up the pole and wires, and told us we were going to get 175 Amp service. So we built out for 175 Amp. We setup a meter box, conduit, weatherhead, and master breaker. Ran all the wires per code, except the line going from the pole to the house. We decided to do 200 Amp instead of 175 Amp since it's a buried line, and we wanted the option to do 200 Amp in the future.
Then we called Entergy out to hook up the electricity. They came out again, and left us a nice sheet explaining that they could not run 175 Amp service to our home, they were going to run 200 Amp service. Our build out, unfortunately, was for 175 Amp service and not suitable for connecting. Furthermore, while we were close enough to run 175 Amp service from their pole to our pole, we were not close enough to run 200 Amp service and needed to install an extra pole. After grumbling a little, we tore everything back off the pole and started rebuilding for 200 Amp service. Thank goodness we buried a 200 Amp line to the house, as it would have been a pain to dig up and rebury it. We also started to call Entergy to find out how much it would cost to have them install a second pole. After 18 calls with 18 prices ranging from "Oh, the first pole is done for free" to "Well, the pole is $1,000 plus the cost of our contractors plus a separate deposit for our pole against damages", we ended up with someone who finally confirmed with us for $500.
After rebuilding for 200 Amp, and settling the question about the second pole, we called Entergy out again to install the pole and hook up the service. I have just received a phone call informing me that they were not going to install service for us because, get this, the original utility pole is 2 feet too short! Out of the 2 times they came out there, the sheet of code specifications, and the numerous phone calls discussing exactly what we need to do to have service run, it took them this long to tell us the pole was too short! This means we have to once again tear everything down, actually dig the line to the house partially up, dig up the grounding rod, dig out the utility pole, and then install a brand new pole to reattach everything to *again*.
Before someone suggests we hire a contractor, we ended up being forced to use a contractor for the water hookups because of how the water utility switched our sewer and water hookups around from what we requested. The contractor proceeded to run the pipes completely outside of code, including putting the sewer line down the center of our driveway, and then called their buddy at the utlity company to do the inspection and pass it. *sigh* I'm still trying to find a lawyer to discuss whether this is bad enough to take them to court over.
