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- Published: Wednesday, 12 October 2022 20:28
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Utilities
When all buy or rent a house, all utility lines come to your home. This may not be true if you are living off-grid, i.e a no place so far from city, where the city or private companies don't provide any of these utilities. Providing these utilities cost a lot of money, and is recovered from you in form of utility bills and other property taxes. The main utilities include the following:
- Electricity: This is provided by the power company. Most of the time, it's provided by the City. City is the transmitter of electricity, though it may be generated by private companies too, which sell it to us. If you are off grid, you generate your own electricity via wind or solar panels, and keeping a generator as backup.
- Gas: This is natural gas used for cooking or heating your home. In countries like India, you buy separate cylinders which come preloaded with LPG. Over here, the city or private company lays gas pipes to bring gas to your home. If you are living off grid, you need to have a big tank outside your home which can store gas. You ask the Gas company to fill it, whenever you are running out of it. This costs lot less than having city supply gas to you via their gas lines. In USA, you will find mostly these 2 gases:
- Natural Gas: Natural gas is primarily Methane (hydrocarbon with one carbon atom), and is the most used gas for residential gas lines. It's cheaper than electricity for cooking and heating purpose
- Propane: Propane is another hydorcarbon with 3 carbon atoms. It's usually sold in tanks in grocery stores. It's more expensive than natural gas.
- Water: Water is provided by the city. They lay those water lines which enter your home. Water is chemically treated in the water plant, which makes it very safe to drink. If you are off grid, you need to have a wellor a hand pump (old style, manual or automatic). Or have a motor which will take water out of the ground from deep below, and store in some good size water tank. This is the way most homes are India are built, where a water tank sits on the roof, and gets it's water via a motor pump which takes water from the ground. There's no water supplied by city. Although that is changing in big size cities.
- WasteWater: This is the waste water that leaves your house. This includes water leaving your drainage pipe from using the shower, toilet, kitchen, washer, dishwasher, etc. This is not only water, but also poop, grease (from cooking oil) passing down the kitchen drain as well as anything else you shove down your drain. Usually city provides both services = water and wastewater. However, if you are offgrid, you may not get both services. In such a case, you will need to have a septic system that can get rid of the waste water from your house. We'll talk about installation and repair of septic system in a separate section.
Cost of utilities:
Cost of utilities varies a lot from city to city and state to state. I'll try to give a rough estimate of what I pay in Texas.
Electricity Cost:
Electricity costs around 10 cents/KwHr in Texas. The rates go up to 13 cents/Kwhr once you exceed a certain Threshold, usually 1000Kwhr. You have to pay about $20-$30 in fixed costs every month. Assuming you consume 1000 KwHr on avg every month, you have to pay about $150/month in Electricity bill. During summers, your Electricity bill goes to $200/month, but during winter it goes to about $100/month. In some cities as Austin, the City provides Electricity, while in other metros as Dallas, there are 1000 of private companies selling electricity. So, prices in Dallas tend to be lower due to intense competition, while in Austin, it's basically a monopoly of the city.
AC is the biggest consumer of electricity. In summer, it is used to cool the house. Some people keep their AC turned off while not at home during the day, and turn it on when they come back from work. There are lot of competing theories on whether there's any advantage to doing that. Some claim that you actually end up spending more since AC takes up more than 2X the power to cool the room, since it gets very inefficient when cooling the home that is way too hot. There's this nice article, where they show multiple scenarios. Turns out that you may end up saving at most 10% in electricity cost if you keep your AC off for 8 hrs or more during the day. See the graphs in link below. The data is still debatable. I've personally tried a lot of these experiments and frankly the savings are miniscule. I would probably leave AC running at 85F or so during the day, so as to prevent the home from getting too hot. You might save $10-$20 every month in summer doing this.
Keep fans running, since they consume much less energy than AC. Fans are from 20W to 100W power, and so consume about $10-$30 per year. Ceiling fans are most efficient of all fans such as Tower fans, portable fans, etc.
Fan cost => https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/home-and-garden/do-ceiling-fans-use-a-lot-of-electricity/ar-AA1fqktR
TIP: Ceiling fans should be set to run counterclockwise during summer, and clockwise during winter.
Refrigerators, even though running 24x7 consume only about 200KWhr per month. Electronics such as TV, phones, laptops, etc combined consume less than 100KWhr per month, so not much savings possible there.
Gas Cost:
Gas is provided t houses, since heating or cooking with electricity is very expensive. Gas costs around xxx in Texas.