Saturday, November 07, 2015

go figure

My October "rent" (it's not really rent) was a little over W190,000, or about $158. I had expected this month's rent to top that because I'd had the A/C on almost constantly until a couple weeks ago, and I've used my electric fan every day to dry out my poorly ventilated bathroom after I shower every morning. The fan is on for hours, toiling away while I'm at work. With all that electricity consumption, I was sure my bill this month would top W200,000. Not true. The actual bill, when it arrived, was about W30,000 cheaper than the previous month's: W162,000 (about $135).

My coworker and I have been puzzling over why utilities are so amazingly cheap, and the only theory we have, at the moment, is that we both live in large apartment buildings where the cost of things like gas and electricity are diffused over such a large number of people that cheap utilities are inevitable. Does our theory hold water? No idea. I could probably talk to the eggheads in my company's HR department; one of those guys is a "building manager," and he might know the reason why costs are so low.

Meantime, I'm not going to look this gift horse too deeply in the mouth. On my mammoth budget spreadsheet, I've listed the "rent" as W200,000 per month. Every time I fall short of that number, that's extra money for me. Not a bad thing.


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1 comment:

Sperwer said...

Utility charges for large multi-unit buildings are heavily subsidized. There are numerous lawsuits brought by various ad hoc associations of owners of single family and villa housing now pending to challenge the discriminatory pricing - electric costs got a single family house like hours can run up to 3-400,000 a month in winter. I imagine it would be more than double that in summer if one were to use AC; we don't. We installed a solar system a few years ago that has enabled us to reduce the cost of power to something more nearly approximating the subsidized apt complex rate