SAN DIEGO -- San Diego Gas & Electric said mistakes on customer power bills are about to be eliminated because of a state-of-the-art smart meter. However, when a 10News employee was overcharged after the meter had been installed, the 10News I-Team had some questions on behalf of all SDG&E customers.

The smart meters are a $500 million project that will give more than 1 million SDG&E customers the power to monitor their daily power use online and ensure an accurate bill.

"Is everybody going to have a smart meter?" asked I-Team reporter Mitch Blacher.

"Everybody is going to have a smart meter," said an SDG&E representative.

"Everyone of your customers?" asked Blacher.

"Every single one of our customers," the representative said.

SDG&E said the smart meter is the meter reader of the future, as a human will no longer be needed to check how much power a customer uses every month. All readings will be done by a computer.

SDG&E installed the smart meter at Sarah Lutz's house, but her bill the following month doubled.

"I remember they had brought a thing around to the house saying they were going to put these in, and I said maybe that could be a reason for it," said Lutz.

When Lutz called to complain they were told first that the bill was correct, but eventually an SDG&E supervisor re-read the meter and found a mistake worth more than $100. SDG&E said it has nothing to do with the smart meters.

"You bring up a perfect point. This is exactly what smart meters are going to solve," said the SDG&E representative. "What this person actually had was a person walking up to their home and that is what we billed that from."

SDG&E said the billing mistake happened because the smart meter is still being read by humans.

"Right now, it's the equivalent of a Ferrari parked in your garage -- you haven't really seen what it can do yet," said Michael Shames, the director of consumer watchdog group Utility Consumers' Action Network.

Shames said billing errors should become less common once the smart meters get turned on, but that the transition could be a bumpy one.

"There's a real potential whenever you start installing new meters in mass the way SDG&E is ... there's a real potential for mistakes. I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more of these kind of complaints," said Shames.

Right now, 130,000 smart meters have been installed and SDG&E said when they are finished, 1.4 million customers will have a smart meter.

Consumer watchdogs advise customers to watch their bills closely during the transition to smart meters. They said now is the time mistakes may happen.

"The corrected bill was more than $100 less," said Lutz. "That's a huge huge difference ... so glad we checked on that."

SDG&E said they will double check every customer's meter for three billing cycles before letting it take over the job full-time.