The Trouble With Utilities

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There’s no denying the pleasantness that the utilities have added to our lives. I dearly love my air-conditioner, though I survived just fine with electric fans. Plus, while it’s nice not to have to cut firewood anymore, when the electric goes off, my gas furnace is useless. Cell phones are nice, and a great safety tool, but I average nearly as much cost for them for a year as I do for my year’s gas bills. Cable and internet? I’d hate to lose them, but I lived just fine before I had them. City water, I think I’ll keep as long as I can.

There’s an old saying that goes, “Luxury, once tasted, becomes necessity.” Since my wife hates the extra dirt that comes with heating with wood, she’s never allowed me to go back to wood heat. Therefore, when we had a chimney fire that required the demolition of part of the chimney many years back, we never bothered to build it back. The wood stove remains in the living room for ambiance alone, useless during a power outage. That means that it would be equally useless if we lost gas pressure, too. I guess they have us where they want us. In some places, it’s illegal to save rainwater or heat with wood. It has something to do with saving the earth, I’m told.

Besides our dependence on them, the utilities keep getting more expensive, and always will. Combined, they now require about 25% of what I earn in a year on my current job. Water, gas and electric are monopolies, so there’s no competition to help to help keep prices down or increase efficiency, though corporate greed might help increase the latter. In fact, they’re pretty much guaranteed a “reasonable” profit since they would leave millions cold, miserable and in the dark should they go out of business, so the government lets them have what they “need” to continue. That is as it must be, I suppose, but it’s a system that invites constant abuse.

I won’t go into what happens to the food we have stored when utilities falter, but I will say that I remember fondly the days of cellars overflowing with food. No, let’s just look at the money angle for now. If EVERYBODY got careful about cutting their utility bills, that would cut into the company’s profits, so the utility board would let them raise their prices. We’d then have cut utility usage for absolutely no purpose but to let the company get more money for less product. Folks in my area started getting more conservative with their water usage a few years ago when the company managed to get a raise to help pay for an expansion of their service area (thus bringing them more customers). The reduced usage cut into their profits, so they got yet another raise to offset people using less water. The situation juggled back and forth a few times and I now pay three times more a month for half as much water.

The bottom line is that you can only save money on utility bills for as long as very few other folks try to do the same. The REAL bottom line is that the only way you can save money on utilities is to turn them completely off, as in go entirely off the grid. However, for most folks, luxury, once tasted, still becomes necessity. © 2012

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