I'm living in a student house with a coin-operated shower and I want to have a go at a little bit of maths.

5.6p /KWh up here, mine you it's a well known 'fact' that we Scots are tighter than a chickens chuff!
 

A coin-operated shower? I wonder what sadist dreamt that one up. What happens if you're half way through a shower and the money runs out? Yikes. I was a student for seven years all told (undergrad then MA then PhD) and lived in some pretty hideous accommodation, much of which should have been pulled down on health & safety grounds. But I would have drawn the line at that.

In all the shared houses and flats I lived in, there were never any arguments over the electricity bill - we just split it evenly. I had one housemate who refused to turn lights off at night or when she went out, and eventually I had a right old go at her for that. She wanted to leave her bedroom light on for security. Given that it was on the ground floor she had a point, so we reached a compromise whereby anyone who wanted to do that put an energy saving bulb in their light.

The real blood-letting came over the 'phone bill. For two years I had a French girlfriend and my housemates would always try and make me pay a disproportionate amount of the bill on the grounds that it had to be me calling France. In fact I really didn't 'phone her very often: we did most of our 'talking' by email. In the end I insisted on an itemised bill, which came as a bit of a shock to the housemate who had been trying to make me cough up. The 'phone calls to her other half in Inverness (this being from Exeter) turned out to be the main culprit, i.e. to the tune of £190. The moral of that story is always get an itemised 'phone bill in a shared house: the couple of quid it costs more than pays for itself in avoided arguments.
 

On a more recent trip, jet flight replaced student-class steamship; rented car replaced bicycle, and hot water was continuous and unmetered. And the snuggery disappeared from Irish bars, and English pubs were no longer divided into separate rooms (Gentlemen's Bar, Saloon Bar, & Local were the designations I remember.) And all the "fun" was taken out adding up purchases by the change to decimal currency. (No farthing, tuppence, thrup'ny bit, shilling, quid, two&six, half-crown, crown, or guinea quotations.)

Pete Naples wrote:
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5.6p /KWh up here
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So lets assume the shower I have is 2000 Watt. So runing it for 15min
uses up half a KWh. And i'm charged 50p

Or lets assume that a KWh is 10p. So 50p is 5 KWh. The shower runs for 15 minues so the shower would have to be. (5000x4 *think* 20,000 Watt !!!

I'll have to start taking baths instead.

Leo Enticknap wrote:
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coin-operated shower? I wonder what sadist dreamt that one up. What happens if you're half way through a shower and the money runs out?
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You shout WTF?, then run back to your bedroom and wash the conditioner from your hair in the sink.
 

--jhawk
 

So running it for ¼ of an hour would only cost 2.5 pence approx.

that is of course if you were running it at full power. i.e. skin like leather

I think.
 

I sat down to look at my electric bill and figure out how the taxes and other charges are calculated as this is not explained but apparently here in Chicago both the state and city taxes (TWO city taxes!) are per kWh rather than a dollar percentage. So I guess no tax accrues on the monthly fixed "customer charge"--the small fee you pay whether you use any power or not.

Most businesses pay a demand rate where one is charged not only for energy consumed (kWh) but also whatever the peak draw was during the month (kW). Fortunately my usage is low enough that even though it's a demand meter I don't pay a demand charge (which is something like $14 per kW!) but instead they tack on another few cents per kWh as a separate line item on the bill ("in lieu of demand").

With taxes it comes out to about 12 cents per kWh.
 

quote:

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Pete Naples wrote:
Leo, you've just removed the rose tinted glasses I'd been wearing when thinking about my time as a student! Thank you, I'd forgotten about all that nonsense. From there it leads to who's been using my toothpaste/margarine/beer etc!

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I have a fridge in my bedroom. Untill you have slept in the same room as a fridge you dont know what evil noises fridges make in the middle of the night.

 

As for student houses, been there, done that (for far too long, some would argue) and the experience has made me determined that unless I get married I am NEVER sharing a house or flat with another individual again. The University places were the worst because you had absolutely no control over who you lived with. First there was a mad Nigerian poet (or at least, he claimed to be a poet) who spent his days repeatedly watching a video of Princess Di's funeral and boiling pans of pigs' trotters in oil, which stunk the house out. The cleaner refused to step foot in his room because she was convinced he was doing Voodoo rituals in there. Then there were three biology postgrads who never washed up anything (perhaps because they wanted to analyse what would grow on it if they left it for long enough), themselves included. Then half the rugby team moved in: I would come back from 15-hour shifts at the cinema to find them in the middle of noisy parties (so noisy, in fact, that residents from two streets away eventually complained to the university). If anyone had attempted to inflict a coin-operated shower on me that would have been the last effing straw, and I think I'd have carried out some modifications.

I did hear of one student household which reverse-phased the entire ring main in the house in order to disable the meter...

<<I would imagine its somewhat like over here in the states. The more you use the cheaper it is.>>

The opposite held true in Romania under the Ceacescu regime, where the more you used, the more expensive it cost per unit. If you exceeded your quota, you were fined, and if you did it often or didn't pay your fines promptly, your service was cut off. The largest
bulbs for domestic use were 40W, and apartments were fused, not with circuit breakers, nor plug fuses, but with bare fusible wire stretched across clips in ceramic blocks, guaranteed to melt if you tried to exceed your quota or use an appliance. Trams rolled dark within, with headlights no brighter than candles without.
Thus by restricting supply, the communist government hoped to reduce demand.