I am in the process of renting 3,5 piece apartment in Geneva. The place has electric radiators and electric boiler for the hot water.

I wonder whether electric bill will be enormous?

What are people paying for electricity in Geneva?

Electricity prices are high but worse in cities.
.15 to .30 /hwh. for Fribourg, so if you have a 1000w heater on for 1 hour it will cost you CHF.15-.35, plus taxes, connection, etc etc. doesn't seem like much, but after 3 months, and one full tub of water (which normally takes 5-8kw and 4 hours to recover) ---
well you can be afraid! It is not cheap.

heres a link for Fribourg:
http://www.groupe-e.ch/index.php?idnav=194

I have a 3 bedroom row house with oil heating (not for water) my bill for the last Q was CHF 43, but the one before that was over 600! I think their usage estimation software need upgrading.

you got to be kidding me?? Electricity bills are so cheap here compared to ireland at least. In 1 1/2 years here i've had to pay a bill about 3 times as the others were all positive adjustments from the first bill i paid. the most i've forked out was 27 CHF though compared to 80 Euro or more back home.

I am sorry, I am confused a little:
.15 to .30 /hwh.,
"so if you have a 1000w heater on for 1 hour it will cost CHF.15-.35"

did you mena 15-35 francs?


This thing is on constantly, isn't it?

I guess my concern is that it's gonna be much more expensive to have "electric" heating and hot water rather than conventional ones.

You should check to if the water is heated at night when electricity is cheaper. That's how ours works.

My bill is about 100 a quarter.

Also they ask you which type of electricity you want, priced depending on how green it is.

i went and looked at the website of the electricity provider for geneva

a water boiler is with VAT 16.36.- francs a month,as for the other cost it varies a lot,but consider that the tariffs are lower over weekends and during the night, so usually the water boilers are programmed to heat themselves up during nighttime when the electricity is cheapest,it's only getting expensive when you switch the heater on manually during day time.

In our flat we have a 300liter water boiler and are five ppl (4 girls/1 boy ) and it's sufficient that all of us can take a shower and i still have hot water for cleaning!

As for the heating,the benefit of electrical heating is you can adjust the thermostats yourself and decide how warm it shall be in the flat,if you have them all the time on top marks of course it'll be very expensive.But given the fact that swiss houses often are very well insulated you might not need to heat a lot.

We pay about 150chf a quarter and use almost nothing ourselves, I think most goes to the heating!

I have just checked our cost of electricity, and unless I'm mistaken Energie Uster is incredibly cheap compared to Zürich

http://www.energieuster.ch/de/elektrizitaet.html

8.40 rp/kWh peak inc
5.28 rp/kWh off peak inc

Does anybody know why it's so much cheaper?

So—we've been getting a bill of CHF 130.00 every 2 months here in Bern. Personally I thought this is crazy ass. I know that in Canada my parents pay something like 30 bucks a month!
We don't even have a TV either...although I do have what looks like The Internet in one room
Today I called up EWB to get to the bottom of this. The rep told me that they come and take a reading only once a year and so the bi-monthly bill is calculated based on that. At the end of the year if you have overpaid they simply refund you the difference or credit your account. I think what happened with us is that we didn't call EWB for a while.....like probably close to a year ...so our first bill was huge and now that's what we've been stuck with. I hope that's it, because 130/month is effin crazy.

By the way, while we're on the subject of electricity bills...some of you may not be aware of a little fiend called vampire energy. It's absolutely shocking how much energy some electronics/appliances waste while "off". Have a look here: http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/tran...ireenergy.html