ᐅ Additional Costs and Experiences with KfW55 Standard

Payday schrieb:
Landlord’s additional costs – but you have to pay them all anyway... (Water/sewage of course, garbage too, property tax as well, building insurance, and the rest you usually cover yourself, like heating depending on the situation)...

Exactly right. We even had to pay our share of the property tax.

With one difference:
Back when I was renting, I paid a monthly advance of $170 for heating. Then, each year, there was an additional heating bill between $500 and $800 – once even $1700. Oil heating, supposedly all modern and well insulated. Well.

On top of that came the difficult-to-estimate electricity consumption for the older instant water heater, which still had to be paid.

Here, the heating costs of this house, which is comparable in living space, are significantly lower, and you can cover many other costs from that – like you said, costs that come up anyway.

In our comparatively small (50 sq m (540 sq ft)) temporary apartment during the house construction, the advance payment for night storage heaters was $80 per month. After a year of not overheating and living in full warmth, the extra bill was $1680. Even the landlord (it was his first rental) was surprised... The new instant water heater at least had a useful display, so hot water consumption was measurable here—$80 per month. But that was household electricity and had nothing to do with heating. The heating energy demand for the semi-basement temporary apartment without an insulated floor slab was really impressive (still is, as it’s still standing).

Now, we don’t use more or less energy, don’t heat differently, and don’t shower differently, but the amounts for heating and hot water in the house are just different, and lower.

In the end, living always costs a relatively large amount of money...

Regards
Thorsten

GEZ freeloader...

never heard of it but deemed it good

...so the expression itself.....not the institution as such

Cruncher1978 schrieb:
License fee moochers...

never heard of it but sounds about right

...I mean the term itself.....not the institution as such

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He means me from the front side.

With one difference:
In the past, when renting, I paid $170 per month in advance for heating.
Then I had additional heating bills between $500 and $800 annually — once even $1700.
Oil heating and supposedly everything modern and well insulated. Well.

....

But you have a really extreme negative example here. Before, we lived for one year in a fully renovated terraced house and had heating costs, including hot water, of 50€ (about $54) per month. And that despite the calculated consumption value according to the energy certificate being 90, which is twice as high as our current one of 44.2 kWh/(a·m²). There, we actually didn’t heat some rooms at all, and others never got warm (in the large bathroom, there was only a towel warmer as a heat source (haha...)). Now, it is 20–22°C (68–72°F) throughout the house, and we expect roughly about 50€ (about $54) in consumption per month. (I record the meter readings for gas, water, and electricity every few weeks — I printed out an Excel sheet and stuck it to the electrical panel.)

Hi Payday,

thanks for the clarification – I didn’t understand the connection at first.

The example was actually part of my and my wife’s life for 7 years. Of course, we only realized afterwards that we had been misled about the costs when signing the lease agreement. The apartment had an extremely high consumption…

Regarding the meter readings: I do it similarly to you, taking readings once a month and entering the values into a spreadsheet, just to keep track.

Best regards

Thorsten

Such a table becomes invaluable over time, as it always provides an overview of how well your advance payments cover the actual costs and whether there might be significant additional charges or opportunities to save somewhere. For example, I now know that our water consumption closely matches what we prepay. Gas is harder to track because we moved in on November 1st and so far have only needed heating. We have almost used two-thirds of the estimated 600 euros/year in the last five months.