Was your electricity cut off legally?
The ERC's Magna Carta for Residential Electricity Consumers sets out exactly when a distribution utility may cut your service for non-payment, and it is stricter than most people realise. Enter your dates and this will check them against the rules — the nine days you have to pay, the written notice that must arrive 48 hours ahead, and the hours and days on which a disconnection may not happen at all.
Nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere. If any rule was missed, you will get a letter you can copy, addressed to your utility's Consumer Welfare Desk.
The rules this checks
Article 32 gives you until nine days after you receive the monthly bill to pay it. These are calendar days, so weekends count against you — a rule worth knowing before you assume you have longer.
Article 19 requires that, for a non-payment disconnection, “a written notice must have been served to the customer forty eight (48)-hours before such disconnection.” A phone call or a text is not that notice. And your bill deposit does not hold off a cut — Article 19 says the utility may disconnect notwithstanding the deposit, which instead guarantees your bills after you are reconnected.
Article 20 bars disconnection “on any week day beyond three o’clock (3:00 P.M.) in the afternoon, Saturdays, Sundays and official holidays” — and it applies “notwithstanding the service of notice”, so a perfectly valid 48-hour notice does not make a Sunday cut lawful.
Article 23 puts an outer limit on getting you back on: “in no case shall exceed twenty-four (24) hours from payment of the said arrearages”, extendable only for justifiable reasons.
Two more worth knowing that this tool does not compute for you. Article 21 lets you stop a disconnection by tendering payment to the crew that came to do it — they must desist and give you 24 hours — though you can only use it once for the same bill. And Article 20 suspends disconnection altogether where an occupant is on a life support system, during a funeral wake, where you can prove you never received the notice, or where the utility failed to bill you monthly and then sent one lump statement, in which case it must offer you a staggered payment scheme. Those are set out here.
Based on the Magna Carta for Residential Electricity Consumers, adopted by the Energy Regulatory Commission on 9 June 2004 under Section 41 of RA 9136 (EPIRA). The ERC has published a draft resolution to replace it, and article numbers may change if that is adopted — the rules above are quoted from the instrument currently on record.