That just sounds like incompetence when the meters were installed. Hopefully this dude gets a fat check from someone for them fucking it up for 18 years.
You just know they’re going to try and do nothing, fix the issue and act like nothing happened. He’ll have to hire a lawyer to have them do the right thing and go through to figure out how much he overpaid… And will still want to just give some sort of account credit.
“We can only access the last six months of billing history. We will credit the difference on your next bill.”
Exactly the type of situation I see happening. And that will be only after he complains that they didn’t proactively do anything about it.
“Here’s a $5 credit for your troubles. Oh, btw, you’ll see a $36 service charge on your next bill to fix the meter issue”