If you use LPG gas for cooking or heating water in your home you might be in for a shock when the next bill arrives.
Genesis Energy has told customers it's upping the price by up to 30 percent, citing inflation and rising wholesale costs.
Genesis Energy customer Sandra Keenan switched to 40kg LPG bottles to heat the water in her home because it was cheaper.
"The hot water cylinder on your power bill is averaging $150 to $200 a month because that's how much my power bill dropped by as soon as we took the hot water cylinder out," she told Newshub.
"As soon as we put the gas in, it just went vrrooomm [down]."
But this week she received a bill from Genesis Energy informing her the price of a gas refill is going up next month.
It's increasing from $114 per bottle to $149 - that's a roughly 30 percent increase.
"Thirty percent! Come on! We're getting hit left, right and centre," Keenan said.
Genesis Energy told Newshub price increases "reflect a range of rising costs to our business".
That includes rising wholesale gas prices and the operational costs of delivering gas to customers which it said is up 28 percent.
Jordan Skates gets his LPG bottles from Rockgas. Their prices have also gone up, citing similar inflationary pressures.
"It doesn't help. Everything's slowly on the rise," he said.
There are about 300,000 LPG customers across New Zealand, and about 270,000 natural gas customers connected to the grid, so that's nearly 600,000 all up - roughly the population of Canterbury.
"Checking the levels is difficult. You've sort of gotta test your hot water and wait until it runs out. As you see, we've run out and we're using little gas bottles," Skates said.
Those gas bottles could become relics of the past if the Climate Change Commission's draft advice to phase it out by 2050 is followed.
Keenan hopes that doesn't happen.
"I think they're stupid because I've done the costs and I've weighed up how we actually use less electricity," she said.
But her tolerance for the rising cost of these bottles is running out of gas.
