Heat is half, electricity is none. You don’t use any less gas, but you DO use less electricity…way less. If you want to get technical, go 5/8, 3/8 on the gas and 7/8 1/8 on the electric, since you’re using slightly more gas (water, cooking) and she’s using miniscule electricity (keeping half of the food in the fridge cold, but not her computer or TV).
The overall rule should be that if you can be reasonably expected to have reduced usage, you should have. If you didn’t, it’s not the roomie’s problem. What I’d do is pay what I paid last month (unless heating went up a lot where you are) and she pays the rest. That works out so that if usage was 50% reduced, like with food, she’d pay nothing. If it isn’t lower at all, like heat, she pays her full share.
It would be nice of you to let her pay slightly less on the gas bill (no cooking) and a bit less on the electric bill (no lights on in her room, less TV maybe? etc.) but she shouldn’t expect it. If you do pay the entire electric bill, that would be enough in my mind to cover any gas bill “savings”.
Wow. If you want to be that precise, you have to realize that electricity bills usually consist of three components: a customer/service charge, a delivery charge, and a usage charge. Or perhaps it’s not broken down and just listed as some sort of base rate. In the end, the point is that there usually is a base charge that would payable whether the units were occupied or not. Even if no roommates are home for a month, and everything is pretty much off in the unit, you’ll get an electricity bill of some sort. Unless you know what this minimum rate is, it’s impossible to get an accurate idea of what usage is yours and what is the roommate’s. Most people I know avoid this problem by simply splitting utilities among the roommates across the board.
But, if she lived alone, she could have turned the heat way down while she was gone (so that it was just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing and such). There’s no question in my mind that she should pay something for heat while she was gone, but it’s less clear that she should pay a full share.
Oh really? Her living space is still being heated. I have an even better idea. How about the roommates work out a system where they also calculate who is out of the house longer during each day too, and factor that in? Let’s see, I work plus I go to school, so I’m usually actually in my apartment for 8 hours a night. My roommate however isn’t going to school, so he is in the house 12 hours a day… :dubious:
you get the idea… it just can’t really work that way. The only costs that you could get out of are the ones that can be specifically calculated as belonging to one person or another… i.e. long distance phone calls.
I’m not saying everyone should do it my way. I’m just saying that’s what we do and we’re both happy with it, since it has only come up once for each of us.
We figure that when we’re both home, things (heating, lights) are on at pretty much all hours as we’re on different schedules and usually at least one of us is home. When only one person is around, things are on only when that person is home. We don’t have central heating or a thermostat, so the heater and lights are only on when someone is home and awake.
I don’t disagree, entirely - I just lean towards the simpler split, just because it avoids setting up things like the idiocy of fighting in the summer if one has an A/C in her bedroom, and the other has a fan, and trying to balance that utility bill, later. As I said later in my post, a 2/3 share for HazelNutCoffee and 1/3 for her roommate might be something she could consider offering - but I would be reluctant to suggest it, myself.
Well, it could work that way, if everyone agreed on it; it’s just that the calculations are probably not worth the effort. I pay less than half the rent for my (shared) place because my room is smaller. I pay a bit more because I get to use the off-street parking space. When the projector lamp goes, I pay more than half for the replacement, since I use it more. But all this stuff was pretty much worked out beforehand, not calculated each month.
I’ve been gone from my house that I share with three roommates for almost a month now, and I fully intend on paying my share of the utility bill. Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean that the temperature of the house is going to decrease.
“Okay roommates, I am going to be gone for a month and I don’t want to pay my 1/4 of the heating bill so you’re just going to have to reduce the thermostat by 1/4. So just keep the house at 51 degrees and we’ll call it even!”
I’m also going to pay my $30 for the cable and internet. Just because I’m not using it that month doesn’t mean that I am going to stick my other roommates with my share.
Perhaps, if you’re feeling guilty about it, just don’t make her pay for the water bill since she’s obviously not there taking showers or whatever. However I’m pretty sure I’m still going to pay 1/4 of the water bill for the month I wasn’t there, 11 bucks isn’t that big of a deal to me and it’s not worth getting mad over.
