This time I am writing about utilities, and let me warn you it might not be as thrilling as my description of the swimming pool.
But yes, electricity and gas. It should be simple, right? They turn on when you need them, you get a bill for them every month, everyone's happy. I try not to make direct comparisons too often between the US and Germany but this time I just have to. Why do they make it so hard here? Let me explain.
When you live in an apartment building in the US, there is one water heater for the building and all the energy meters are usually together in the basement or outside so that the energy company guy can stop in and read them every once in a while. As a tenant you never really think about it. In German apartments, you have your own water heater. Ours happens to be in our shower. It looks like this:
When we first moved in the water heater was broken a lot. A nice hot shower would turn ice cold as soon as the pilot light cut out. Eventually that got fixed but we still know that you can't shower and wash dishes at the same time. The stranger thing to me is how you pay for utilities.
Instead of billing you for what you've used, the energy company sets a monthly amount for you to pay based on the number of people living with you and the size of your apartment. Every year they compare what you've paid with what you actually used and you either get a refund or have to pay more, depending on how close the payments were to the real cost. Brian and I took this as a challenge and kept our bathroom and kitchen mostly unheated for the winter.We kept the thermostat set so it was cool enough for guests to be uncomfortable and us to wear layers for hanging around the house.
How do they know how much energy you use? Either they come to your place and look at the meter (ours hangs attractively next to the living room doorway), or you tell them. Let's talk about the first option. The energy company posts a notice in the lobby area of the building about a week in advance, saying that they will come to do the readings - always on a weekday and always in the day time. They invite you to give a key to your neighbor if you know you won't be home. So either you take off work, or find someone in the building who has, and invite that person to have access to your place and all of your stuff. This is so common that we just spent an entire chapter in my German textbook writing letters to our fictional neighbors, asking them to let the meter reader in. Maybe neighbors who have lived next to each other for years are ok with this, but we are the weird foreigners on the top floor who don't speak a lot of German and do our laundry too early on the weekends. No one gets our key. Who knows what they'd do with it. Maybe they'd sabotage the washing machine.
It so happened that I missed the meter reader last time, and had not given anyone our key. They didn't seem to mind too much - I just got a postcard in the mail asking me to send in my customer ID number and the numbers that appeared on the meter. The American in me thinks that some people might learn enough about the units of measure for energy that they would lie about their meter reading to save money. But I don't think Germans would do that. It would be against the rules. So, not knowing enough to lie about it, I went online and entered the numbers I read on the meter. If that's all that has to be done, why send meter readers out anyway? A couple of weeks later, we got a letter - we had used about 30 euros less than we'd paid over the 6 months we'd lived in the building. I was a little disappointed, to be honest. Putting on a scarf when I got out of bed had only been worth 30 euros? Of course, we have no concept of what energy costs here, other than that it must cost more than we'd been paying at home.
So what I've learned from the whole experience is that it's a good idea not to heat the kitchen, though I do draw the line at taking cold showers. I've also learned how to write my neighbor a note asking if he/she would take my key and hang out in my apartment, sabotaging my appliances while waiting for the meter reader. If I'm lucky I'll get some money back this time next year.
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