Utilities

Be forewarned, the utility companies such as electric, gas, and telephone, do go out of their way to get customers, and seem always to claim to be the cheapest. They’ll call you, stop you on the street, and knock on your door. Be ready to say you’re not interested (claiming to be a tourist is a great one) or you’ll just get into a vicious circle of expensive suppliers. There’s an online price comparison of utilites called U-Switch. The one thing you may be surprised to have to pay for is a TV License.

Electricity, gas, and water services are available through local companies, you may want to compare rates for electricity and gas as there are competitive companies. (Please be aware that these firms make huge efforts to gain your business, transferral from one to the next is very easy, so much so that it can be done without your knowledge.) The main sources of heating here are central hot water heating and storage heaters. Storage heaters charge up in the evenings when the electricity is cheapest and give off heat all day long. In my experience they are more common in flats.

The costs will vary of course, but I was pleased with our latest autumn quarterly bills for a 4 bedroom terraced house with a combi-boiler (combination boiler/hotwater heater), the electric and gas were each approximately £75.00 per month. The water bill is a standard flat rate, not charged by quantity used, ours was £160.00 per year, payable in installments, unless you use timed sprinkler systems, at which point you must install a meter. (The tap water is as safe to drink in the UK as in the US.)

Telephone service can be arranged through BT (British Telecom). There are charges for local calls along with national and overseas distance calls. There are other telephone services you may want to check into. Try the Oftel or USwitch website for comparisons. As for calling the US though, I recommend Planet-Talk. They currently are charging 3p per minute to the US 24 hours a day. So you can talk to friends/relatives in the States for the same price as making a local daytime call through BT.

There are loads of free internet service providers in the UK, there are free cd’s all over the shops, or you can use a search directory. This is discussed more indepth on the ISPs page. There are now internet call packages where you pay a flat charge to dial the ISP‘s toll-free access number. Otherwise, even with free ISPs, you must pay for a local call. When you’re used to getting free local calls as part of your service it seems ridiculous to pay for every call this way. But, without the cost of the calls, our bill for each quarter is approximately £50. Local calls to our ISP amounted to £70 (that was about 46 hours over the 3 months). BT charges 4p/min for national calls daytime, 2p/min evening/weekends, local calls are 3p/min daytime, 1p/min evening/weekend. One option to BT is NTL, a cable tv and phone service provider available in some areas. They also have a service for free internet calls for £10 per month by using a dialing adapter on your phone line.

Mobile Telephones are the rage, and compared to US costs, they are cheap here, everyone has one, even the kids. I keep one for urgent needs only, and it costs us about £8 per month (Vodafone Pay as You Go), and about £50 at the start for the phone.

If you have a television, you must pay for a tv “licence”. This is a tax of sorts to fund the free public channels (ie. BBC). If you don’t pay, you may be caught and heavily fined. They have vans that patrol the same way that cable companies do in America.

The basic free channels are: BBC1, BB2, ITV (3), Channel 4, and Channel 5. You can receive these over your arial. Digital television services can be received in three ways: through an existing television aerial, as Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT); through a cable connection, as Digital Cable Television; via a satellite dish, as Digital Satellite Television.

Viewers who choose to receive digital television by any of these methods need either to obtain a special set-top box decoder which will enable digital television pictures to be reassembled on screen, or a television set with this decoder built in. For services for which a charge is payable, and in some cases on satellite for services that are free, a smart card is also needed to allow reception. These services usually have special connection offers giving either or both free installation and/or box. (The boxes are not rented from the service as in the US. You can get the boxes from electronics shops such as Curry’s and Dixons or direct.) Keep in mind if looking for US cable channels, that a lot of the UK counterparts are entirely separate, ie. Nickelodeon and MTV do not necessarily carry the identical US programming, some, but less not more.