The "The Weather Changes More Often than the Thread Title" Complaint Thread

butterflyfish

Torquinox said:

butterflyfish said:

Complaint: My heating oil bill has been $336/month since it went up May. I just got an email that it is going up again to $579/month, because reasons. At this point it seems like it might be cheaper to heat my house with piles of money set on fire.

That's a lot of cabbage! Unless your house is enormous and freezing cold, hard to think why it's so much, except it's actual oil with elevated oil prices.

It's only about 1700 square feet, so not enormous at all. Oil is just absurdly expensive at the moment for obvious reasons. If it didn't cost so much to switch to another heat source, I would absolutely do it.

LeatherGryphon

Non-complaint:  Mini-adventure over.  Everything came out OK.  8:00 bus to the hospital area in the center of the city.  Had big breakfast at small local diner near the hospital.  Toddled down the hill to the dying commercial area.  Went into the bank branch, deposited a check, took out some cash, got some $1 coins.  Toddled across the parking lot to the dollar store.  Browsed, found nothing that I couldn't do without.  Toddled across the street to the medical labs & my cardiologist.  Unnecessarily notified cardiologist receptionist that I had postponed my stress test, as an excuse to use their waiting room to comfortably waste some more time while TV and people watching and to use their nice clean toilet facilities.  Ubered to near part of city to the Chinese takeout on the west end of the decrepit mini-mall, got my Szechuan Chickentakeout, toddled to the middle of the decrepit mini-mall to the hole-in-the-wall beanery for lunch (instead of breakfast for a change), Ubered to dentist an hour early.  Fell asleep in dentist's waiting room,  Dentist arrived at 1:00 and got me in the chair.  I screamed a couple of times as he shattered my molar and spent nearly a half hour trying to get all the pieces out.  Ubered home, commiserated with Uber driver who had also had a tooth pulled a couple of days earlier.

Complaint:  Had wonderful time changing blood soaked gauze pads every 45 minutes a few times.  Anesthetic wore off about supper time.  Soup, for the next couple of days.  So, my Szechuan Chicken is dying in the refrigerator.  That, wasn't well planned.  Looking forward to drooling pink ooze onto my pillow case tonight.

Richard Haseltine

butterflyfish said:

Torquinox said:

butterflyfish said:

Complaint: My heating oil bill has been $336/month since it went up May. I just got an email that it is going up again to $579/month, because reasons. At this point it seems like it might be cheaper to heat my house with piles of money set on fire.

That's a lot of cabbage! Unless your house is enormous and freezing cold, hard to think why it's so much, except it's actual oil with elevated oil prices.

It's only about 1700 square feet, so not enormous at all. Oil is just absurdly expensive at the moment for obvious reasons. If it didn't cost so much to switch to another heat source, I would absolutely do it.

Is it a flat fee, rather than based on usage?

butterflyfish

Richard Haseltine said:

butterflyfish said:

Torquinox said:

butterflyfish said:

Complaint: My heating oil bill has been $336/month since it went up May. I just got an email that it is going up again to $579/month, because reasons. At this point it seems like it might be cheaper to heat my house with piles of money set on fire.

That's a lot of cabbage! Unless your house is enormous and freezing cold, hard to think why it's so much, except it's actual oil with elevated oil prices.

It's only about 1700 square feet, so not enormous at all. Oil is just absurdly expensive at the moment for obvious reasons. If it didn't cost so much to switch to another heat source, I would absolutely do it.

Is it a flat fee, rather than based on usage?

It's calculated on projected usage. They're charging $4.99/gallon times however much they think we're going to use over the winter, and then divided into 9 payments, May through January. I got another email that says we can pay $330/month over 12 months instead. We're going to have to do that because there's no way I'm coming up with almost $600/month. That still ends up being nearly $1k more over the year, though.

That said, it's not a fixed rate this year, so it could go up again.

LeatherGryphon

I was worried about heating costs for this house going up so much that the new landlord might have to suggest that I pay some sort of additional fuel charge to enhance my permanently fixed(written into the house sales contract by previous landlord) rent plus utilities cost(hasn't changed in 18 years. ).  But here's what Gemini reports about the cost of heating fuels.  And since this house is heated with gas, now I don't feel so guilty about my previous landlord's opinion of me, causing my new landlord major problems.  I don't know why I was so lucky.

richardandtracy

Diesel is now averaging £2 per litre. That's $10.20 per US gallon, not a price hike I appreciate, especially as our van does around 23 miles per US gallon. Regards Richard

LeatherGryphon

Ouch!  And diesel used to be the goto fuel for economy!  What happened?  Gemini says the switch happened around the mid 2000s.