1100 square house in Minneapolis suburbs:
Electricity: $180 summer, $125 winter
Gas: $20 summer, $100 winter
Water and Sewer: $30
Telephone: $30
Cable TV and internet : $180
Garbage: $25
Yipes, just get the cell now and dump the land line. You may be able to just transfer the same number.
Me, an apartment, cooking gas $20-25 a month, electric $30 in winter up to $90 in summer ( 2 window units, 4th floor, sunny and hot up here!), water, waste and heat included, wash and dry are a buck a load.
Three-bedroom house in the Pacific Northwest. (That may sound toasty to antediluvians, but in this hemisphere it’s cool and wet.) My house is about 1,090 square feet.
Right now, electricity costs about $90/month. Water is about the same, or a bit less. When Inter comes, it’s time to use the propane-fueled wall furnace. That generally costs upwards of $200/month. (Oh, how I miss those $7-$10/month gas bills in my apartment in L.A.! That, and cooking with gas.) And the oil-filled ‘radiator-style’ space heaters get used in the bedrooms. The electric bill comes to about $130 or $140 per month. Heat is also supplemented by the wood-burning stove insert. It cost me like $300 to have a couple of trees cut down and chunked up into 16" lengths – plus a lot of ‘sweat equity’ when I had to split the logs into reasonable pieces. Wood really does warm you twice. It takes about a year for the wood to be dry enough, and I’ve had plenty to last through the season. Last Winter, the SO bought a cord of wood. It was later in the year, and we were burning the wood I already had from the trees that were cut down; so it came later in the season. We have about ⅔ of it left. I think she paid $240 for it. As for Summer, we have no need for air conditioning. Fans do a good job, and they’re cheap to run. I don’t recall how much the water bill is, but I’ll guess about $70/month. Trash and recycling are picked up every other week, and costs about $45 for three months.
So Summer utility costs are higher than I’d like, but not too bad. Winter is expensive.
