In our system, they calculate your yearly usage, divide it by twelve and that's what you pay on a fixed date each month. I don't know if you can pay variable rates on a monthly basis. I suspect not, unless perhaps with a smart meter but I don't have one.

Of course in the old days, you paid quarterly and strictly what you owed. So you had two big bills in the winter and two small ones in summer. I don't know if anyone still pays that way. Certainly the companies don't like it and they often charge you more.

There is a third way: very poor people use a prepayment meter and have an unfairly high rate as well. They pay for what they actually use.

Here in the States, the default is to pay based on monthly usage, but many utilities offer the option for a payment system such as you describe. Then, at the end of calendar year, they balance it out and start over.

same here at Finland, i dont have to pay for electricity at all, it is free but monthly rent is a bit higher.
i have been considering to mine Ethereum, i wonder if i would get complaint from my landlord.

How does that work?? I don't know of anyone in the UK who provides it for free.

i think that my landlord has contract with energy provider. i haven't checked out how he does it. i am happy with it.
i have plenty of electronics and my monthly electricity bill used to be 120-150€.

I read it as: they pay more in their rent to cover their power usage. Then in turn, their landlord pays the power bill for all residences/units/whatever they own.

I've lived in boarding houses where it was the same deal - the rent includes power, water, etc usage.

Halls of residence is the example I can think of. All my way through uni I had 4-5 C2Q systems running 24/7, deploying all manner of goodness, mostly CS:S goodness, but some Dist Computing as well. Electricity was part of the rent, so i didnt worry.

Nowadays, yeah, electricity costs. Also live in an area where putting solar and wind in isn't allowed, otherwise i'd have put 9kw of solar on the roof and maybe a couple of turbines.

This is how everything is nowadays. First they cripple free market with regulations and taxes and then they say it is not working and needs to be replaced with government services. But government services which have monopoly will cost more than private enterprise. You just don't see it, the price everyone pays is hidden deep in all kind of taxes and fees you pay elsewhere. What do you see is the life standard is in decline for everybody. If you ask them why then they say: eee... uuu... conditions have changed. They won't admit the root cause is their interference and micromanaging which disabled free market. With free market it is as with pregnancy, you either have it or you don't. Controlled free market is total nonsense, yet they are telling that's what we need. My foot.

Some landlords do it here in Canada, not many though. You people in the UK have it pay as you go do you not, or is it the gas meters I seen that used with in your TV shows.

Nothing is free. If someone somewhere works to produce it and gets paid then it is not free. It is just the matter of how you pay for it. If you get it for free it still is not free, it merely means someone else is paying for it. If this someone else is forced to pay then there comes another question ... is it fair?

Nah that is the excuse they use here to get rid of the government monopoly, that it is too inefficient to do it. A pure load of BS as adding a profit onto a fixed cost method of delivering a service is always going to be more expensive. The problem comes when the people getting it think it should be free because they pay taxes, never mind free means abused all to hell with little regard to the use of that resource in most peoples minds. Like when our water used to be without meters, the amount of wastage seen was unreal, put meter on it and make them pay, well suddenly that hose does not run 24/7 anymore.

There is no free market there never has been, it has always been regulated, what has been done to lower our standards of living is the never ceasing attack on any measure of transferring the wealth from the top to those at the bottom of the pile. They take an ever increasing amount and leave the ever fewer scraps to the rest of us. Seen an article no more than two days ago, in Canada the gap is the largest it has ever been in the history of the country during the pandemic this last year. The rich made sure they raked it in while screwing the poor doing it.

Pay-as-you-go meters are not widely used these days, but they are inflicted on poor people who have failed to pay their energy bills. You see, there are laws against actually cutting off energy supplies to families containing children or vulnerable adults, so the companies cheat by using PAYG meters that just don't deliver unless they are fed. That way they can say they haven't cut these people off, they have cut themselves off by not paying.

I think you have a point when you say that a nationalised industry just needs to pay its way whereas private industry needs to make a profit to pay its shareholders. The counter argument is that competition between companies can improve service and bring down prices. The problem is that this argument doesn't work for natural monopolies like gas, electricity and water, which is why I think these should be run as public services.

I have similar experience. Company go bankrupt. There was no electric for one day! No internet! But now we have maked new contract with new company. Some family on same street had no electric for much longer time.

Here that doesn't happen. You get transferred to a new company seamlessly and the electrical current and gas continue to flow in the mean time.

I would politely disagree. The one thing that isn't nationalised here is the Health Service, because we didn't want the hospitals in the hands of a Liquidator. They started a New Children's Hospital, chose the one place hospital grounds that wasn't owned in some way by the Religious, which wasn't a sensible place for it anyhow. It started with an estimated cost of €600,000, suffered delays and some years the estimate is €2,000,000,000+ and likely to rise to €3,000,000!

OTOH, private companies have been more successful.

• As they operated, Parking Meter Attendants, or 'brown owls' as they were known handed out tickets that cost €10. It nearly paid some businesses to park on double yellow lines to get a drop done fast. Then it was privatised. Clampers slapped on clamps that cost €80 to remove, and, unlike the Brown Owls, there was absolutely no mercy. You pay over the phone, then some young dweeb comes along on a scooter, unlocks your clamp, and puts it in a pannier & clears off before he is attacked. There is no appeal to courts without leaving your car, which would be towed away and incur further costs from a separate organisation. That's cured illegal parking.
• People went ape when they were asked to pay for bin collection (€10/month) and did stupidly objectionable things on principle. Refuse Collection was privatised. Now you have to have an account, give them a debit card or pay in advance or your bin isn't collected. Now we're charged separately for Recyclables, Compostable, & landfill-type waste and our house is paying by weight ~€30/month. We have high recyclable & compostable and low landfill. Now the people doing stupidly obectionable things spent a while driving up mountains to dump piles of rubbish, but they were traced forensically and severely treated by the courts,and that shut them up.
• Electricity, gas, & telephone follow the general pattern. The Government infrastructure supplies (Gas, Electricity, telecoms, Internet, Water, etc.) is maintained by one semi-state company, which is wholesale only. Private companies buy from them and sell to Joe Public; all have similar costs. Credit Control is very tight.

It all works here. We had semi-states, but no private company is allowed the same company name. The onus for updating the infrastructure falls on the semi-state distributing supply. Sometimes that's very heavy, but they make their case to Government.