topic Re: Good affordability news! in SmorgasBoard

Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 16:27:24 GMT

Just got the electric bill, it dropped to about $200. Last one was $300, should keep going down the rest of the year.

Gas was $60, that will start going up when heating season starts.

Re: Good affordability news!

crystal626 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 20:56:15 GMT

Nice!

I just checked ours and we dropped from $165 for electric and gas last month to $145 this month. Hoping we go back to $90 until the spring as we won't use the heat much but have to start using the AC pretty early since we get sun all day.

Still though, we shouldn't complain much. We were planning for $150-$200 before the summer started and $300-$400 in the summer. It probably would have been that though if we weren't able to opt out of time of use billing since the bulk of our usage is in the peak hours.

Re: Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 23:28:22 GMT

Wow, $145 is great!

I don't see where time of day would be good unless you had an electric car charging at night.

Re: Good affordability news!

Realist — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 01:51:22 GMT

Congratulations. What did you find to be helpful in reducing your cost?

My cost only goes up, dispite the countless energy efficient solar panel fields the electric company continues to grow. There is no greater scam I find, aside from insurance. My neighbor works for the energy company, and he's paid double, triple, and quadruple time to be available at certain times. Paid to sleep. He's not home much, but his trading time for money - makes bank. Make it make sense with these electric companies.

Re: Good affordability news!

crystal626 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 05:43:47 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
Wow, $145 is great!
I don't see where time of day would be good unless you had an electric car charging at night.

We live in an apartment so electric costs are pretty low comparatively. If this summer hadn't been so hot we wouldn't have hit $165 but we both get miserable in heat so I run the AC at 72 during the day and 70 in the afternoon/evening (otherwise the office gets up to 77).

We have a baseline of like $.18/kWh in the summer after factoring in the 65% of percentage-based adjustments that our PUC has approved and then of course extra fees on top. It's ridiculous that the baseline is $.11/kwh and blows up to $.18/kwh but we are still among the cheapest places in the country for power for now. There is apparently a 4.77% increase effective today and they're seeking an 11.6% gas increase and they're expecting many more increases thanks to data center demand though so that won't hold for long.

TOU billing would really screw us. It's like more than double to use energy between 5-9 M-F. I'm supposed to have my husband work all day and then come home and be unable to use energy after 4? He would lose his mind. I don't know what we will do if they remove the opt out at some point.

Re: Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:16:27 GMT

We live in a 60 yo 3 br house. Fair insulation, new windows. Lot of space for two, room for out of town family to visit. We pay $0.09998 /kWh, about the same as you. We also keep it 70-72, what's the point in ac if you're not comfortable?

Half our bill is various delivery fees, not power. Seems like a lot, but we do get good service. When power is out, it's minutes or hours, not days.

About a year ago our power failed, aep had a guy in a bucket truck here in a few hours, he put in a new line from the pole in 2-3 hours.

Once ac season is over, our bills go down. We have gas heat, hot water, clothes drier and cook stove.

Here in oh10, I think our electricity is 50% gas, 25% coal and 10% nuclear. A little hydro. The balance is "sustainable" sources, which is a catchall term for unreliable and expensive sources. Regions with a lot of those sources pay twice what we do.

Re: Good affordability news!

crystal626 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:10:51 GMT

Yeah Xcel actually does a pretty good job of keeping things running around here, it's just rapidly going up.

In fact I was made aware that the PUC is pressing the energy companies to force everyone onto time of use with no exceptions, which with the current 2.7x multiplier during 5-9PM M-F would massively blow up our bill and to charge us 5-10x more during energy action days, basically when the grid is stressed. Seeing how those days are the hottest days of the year, it basically would come down to the choice of having a thousand dollar electric bill or dying from heat stroke in the evenings as with garages under our unit, all of that heat radiates up throughout the night and stops the place from cooling down on its own otherwise. Fun times.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:58:31 GMT

Ours for a 1 br apartment is running about $130 for a summer bill with lots of air conditioning and two big air purifiers going constantly, and that's in Illinois.

My winter heat is included in the rent. I spoke with some current tenants to gauge whether the landlords here actually give you any heat or not.

Some maliciously comply with the bare minimum 64 degrees which the law requires, some don't give you that but _say_ heat is included.

One of the wars I got into with the crazy landlord in Roger's Park was over hot water. She kept turning it down to like 100 F. If you keep it below 140, the pipes and water heater can actually start growing Legionairre's Disease bacteria. Plus there's just nothing like a tepid shower in the morning when your rent is $1100 a month (in 2018, before the 2020s Greedflation really got going!).

First I just turned it up, she kept turning it back down, eventually she slapped a padlock on it, so I got some bolt cutters, and cut it off, and turned it back up, then she turned it down and slapped another padlock so I cut that one off, she turned it back down, so I turned it up, cut another padlock, and took the door off the frame and threw the door in the dumpster and turned the water heater back up.

She didn't have any cameras. Eventually she just gave up and didn't even bother replacing the door.

If she was so worried about her gas bill she could have just bought a cheap water heater blanket, but nooooooo, let's just torture the paying customers because we're a greedy incompetent meeanie pants.

Technically I could have just called 311 and reported her using the Slumlord Law, but I saved that for when I moved out and handed them a list of code violations.

A landlord that gets a notice of an inspection three weeks from now has three weeks to make sure the hot water is the correct temperature that day, and then turn it down again, and doesn't get you a hot shower that day. She had no idea I was doing inspections of my own to compile a list she couldn't throw together.

Re: Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:09:38 GMT

As @AndrewF mentioned in another thread, the gummit is always trying to drive up costs. All we can do is try to vote them out.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:49:13 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
As @AndrewF mentioned in another thread, the gummit is always trying to drive up costs. All we can do is try to vote them out.

Yep, with the car, the time had long since come to cut off some parasites.

$200 to plate it every year and get the city sticker.

Most expensive combined gasoline tax in the nation (while EV owners still don't pay anything and in fact, get tax credits even though they don't contribute to the highway funds, socialism for the rich while all working class people can do is try to keep a gas guzzler that should have been retired years ago running for months at a time).

Most expensive mechanics hours ever. ($200 an hour....in 2008 I was paying a guy $50 an hour and he said just bring him the parts, you can keep the worst car in the world on the road forever like this)

Tariffs doubled the price of car parts. (Which mechanics double again when they're the ones sourcing them and putting them on.)

Car insurance going up 10-20% every year even though I was told I was "among the top 1% safest drivers in Illinois" by claims and actual driving data. (Car insurance that cost me $20 a month in 2016 is now $130.83 per month, at least it was when I canceled it after selling the car, and more if you don't pay in full.)

Greedy oil companies, supply disruption due to the war. You know it's not bad for business because they know they'll be the "United Fruit Company" of Venezuela soon and get to steal whatever they want right out of the ground and control the state at the same time. = $5.28 a gallon gasoline

(United Fruit used to do this with Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala, and if there was an uprising where these "banana republics" demanded their own self-determination, the US military or CIA came in and backed up UFC, which is now known as Chiquita.)

What did the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition say about war in Star Trek?

Peace is good for business.

War is good for business.

Even if nobody cares where the oil comes from or what had to happen to how many people to get it, Venezuela's infrastructure is going to take at least 7 years and billions and billions of dollars to fix. Even if anyone agrees to do that, it's going to take so long that it's not a quick fix to current gas prices, which are going to be over $5 a gallon in many areas until supplies actually normalize.

Anyway, all this to say that out of parasites you might be able to salt/burn/cut off of you, that car is a mighty tempting target these days thanks to a cabal that is gathered up to extract via tax, oil prices, insurance, and repairs/upkeep.

In some cases, the dealerships on new cars have set things up so that you can only use an oil that's formulated and sold through their dealership.

This would normally violate the Warranty Improvement Act, which says you can use any oil that meets the proper specs, however, according to my ex, John, he has to take his Toyota Prius to the dealership and spend almost $200 for a simple oil change because Toyota has conspired with Exxon-Mobil to only blend that particular additive pack under Toyota's label, which is not sold at Walmart or the car parts store!

This almost certainly violates the Sherman Act, because not even GM does this. They have a licensing program that any oil company can participate in, and it is not a major source of profit to license that certification.

But maybe once GM sees Toyota breaking the law so blatantly, they'll come out with a new dexos that you can't get anywhere else?

The only way they can legally be the only place to get the oil change is if they're doing the oil change for free, according to the Warranty Improvement Act.

I do not like where car "ownership" is going. Don't even get me started on interest rates, which Kevin Warsh (the new Fed Chair) says will probably go up soon due to tariff and energy inflation.

Who knows. Maybe someone will Warsh their hands of him soon since he seems to be implementing the standard monetary policy when he was supposed to lower rates and let double digit inflation rage to finance record government indebtedness?

I could not resist that, btw. I'm from Indiana and it always got on my nerves when you occasionally heard someone say "warsh" instead of "wash". It wasn't common but it definitely happened sometimes. Too close to Ohio I think.

As an aside from not having to spend $5.28 on gasoline that, at best, would get me 17-18 miles, I'm glad that I can just take the bus or train that was heading that way anyway. There's no additional pollution and I don't have to worry that a lot of that money went to some of the bloodiest regimes on Earth.

It's kind of funny that they're still selling gasoline by the gallon when they try to make it look like you're not being swindled by shrinkflation on everything else.

Coffee is getting so expensive due to the failure of the US dollar that it's basically being sold in sachets at this point to people who are trying to get through each day. Monthly rent is too expensive so there are ads on how to add $83 a month with something called "Flex Rent" to pay in two.

Taco Bell says you can finance a tiny $7.99 burrito and whatever else you order, so you can finish paying next month.

But gas is still per-gallon. Too obvious if they started selling it by the half-gallon or per liter?

I wonder how things will look in two years.

News: "Today, gas prices went down to $15.98 per deciliter providing much needed financial support to consumers in the mostly robust economy with solid jobs growth that unexpectedly declined by 200,000 for the 37th month in a row.

Consumer credit card debt reached $14 trillion dollars this week.

When asked to comment on the credit card debt, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had this to say. 'Well, I think it would be cruel, frankly, to remove access to credit for underserved Americans who need a 28% APR loan to pay their water bill. Sure there used to be this place called work that you went to that covered your water bill, but we're way past that now, frankly, and I would appreciate it if the hands-off policy on access to credit was continued.'

Taco Bell announced their new 1 layer burrito that comes with a shell and a packet of fire sauce, for the $5 value menu, in a partnership with Klarna. Here's Tom with the weather."

Re: Good affordability news!

dfwxjer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:11:41 GMT

Ugh ours has only gone up this year. Normally we hover in the $350ish range for electricity in the summer but this July was over $520.

Our house has radiant barrier in the attic, energy efficient windows, all 3 AC systems have been replaced in the last 10 years AND serviced annually. Our effective rate is 17cents per kWh and I keep my plug-in hybrid plugged in to a normal 120v outlet in the garage every night. Nothing has changed year over year except the nonsense fees our provider has been adding.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:20:53 GMT

@dfwxjer wrote:
Ugh ours has only gone up this year. Normally we hover in the $350ish range for electricity in the summer but this July was over $520.

Our house has radiant barrier in the attic, energy efficient windows, all 3 AC systems have been replaced in the last 10 years AND serviced annually. Our effective rate is 17cents per kWh and I keep my plug-in hybrid plugged in to a normal 120v outlet in the garage every night. Nothing has changed year over year except the nonsense fees our provider has been adding.

$520 for electric? Ouch.

Yeah, one win for the "apartment" side is that they're not impossible to close off rooms and pick what you want to air condition, there's also less space, and they often have the heat included.

So you don't get those massive utility bills like you do with a house. Also, some thing like trash pickup, property tax, and water/sewage are included in the rent, whereas you will be facing them broken out and in addition to he 30 year mortgage if you buy a house.

There are so many "incidentals" that nobody plans on. They go "My rent is almost as much as a mortgage." Well, sure, unless you count all those things you're going to go into personal loan and credit card debt to fix with the house when all your money is being eaten by the utilities and the mortgage. $12,000 for a roof. $8,000 for an HVAC system. $6,000 when the sewer backs up.

Homeownership is so overrated. If you live in 90% of the United States, renting is now cheaper than owning a home. 30 years might as well be forever for a lot of people. If you make it into your 30s or 40s without being able to make a down payment, you might as well keep renting.

Because if you ever pay it off, you'll have about 5 minutes there after the 30 year loan ends to enjoy it before the government takes it back to cover the nursing home bill.

In one of my other posts, I commented that Skokie wants to spend $53 million on a park. And you know what that does to your property tax bill when you own a home in Skokie? That would add almost $600 a year to the average house. That all goes into your mortgage. The bank pays the taxes and increases your mortgage, so that someone else can use a park. When we have lots of parks. Maybe you can't use the park because you're drowning in debt and always at work trying to pay for the park.

Your mortgage is going to go up $50 a month just from that **bleep** park, whether you use it or not, and if you don't pay it, the government will literally steal your house and sell it to a tax buyer, or the bank will foreclose.

Over ten years, $600 a year is of course $6,000 in their pocket, not yours. What could you have done with $6,000 other than bailout some crappy owner of a dead industrial site, paying him 10 times more just for the land than the city could get if they took him to Eminent Domain proceedings to get it? The park would still cost $40-45 million even if they condemned the land and paid the real estate group what it's worth, but they never fight these parasites in court, they just hand over 10 times more than the land is worth. I could get it done probably $10 million cheaper than Skokie's village board will, because I'd fight the real estate developers on the beaches, I'd fight them on the shores.

If a homeowner takes that same $50 a month ($600 a year) and invests it into a basic index fund yielding a conservative 8% historical return over a 30-year mortgage cycle, that "minor park tax" doesn't just cost $18,000 in raw cash. It strips away over $70,000 in compounding retirement wealth from the middle class.

I pay the same effective rate on electric than you do, and my summer cooling bill with the air conditioning cranked up is only $130. Not $530.

So there goes one of the arguments for the house. What am I going to do with a house? We are two people. We don't need an entire house.

But people buy them anyway. Unless you start having kids and need more bedrooms, a house never wins. Ever.

More bedrooms starts adding so much to the rent that you might start to pull ahead with the house, or you can just not have kids.

Re: Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:17:05 GMT

@dfwxjer

3 AC systems? Id say you have quite a house. You could probably park my house and @AndrewF 's apartment in there with room to spare.

I have a friend with a huge house. I mentioned he might consider going geo. He has the land area and owns an excavator. He's looking into it.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:23:12 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
@dfwxjer
3 AC systems? Id say you have quite a house. You could probably park my house and @AndrewF 's apartment in there with room to spare.
I have a friend with a huge house. I mentioned he might consider going geo. He has the land area and owns an excavator. He's looking into it.

I think the Sheriff is going to get a ping from the electric company to go out there with FLIR to see what @dfwxjer is growing in the basement. That's my theory at least.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:21:46 GMT

I went thrifting yesterday and got four French Onion Soup bowls for $12 total. Would be $40 on Amazon. Making french onion soup is cheap but buying a set of bowls just to use for that is not cheap.

Then there's the DVDs I picked up. I got 5 of them this time. They raised the price from $1.99 to $2.99. I think more people are interested again because of the insane price hikes on streaming and the constant frustration with low quality filler garbage.

Still, in 2026, $2.99 doesn't even cover a bean burrito at Taco Bell that was 59 cents in 1991. Even by 2000 they were only 89 cents. Inflation has been so hot that in the last 6 years there's been more grocery bill inflation than in the 30 years prior to that, and fast food inflation has been outpacing groceries.

I remember in 1998 when a can of good coffee that was well over 40 ounces, was $3.99 at Lance's New Market. The coffee is half the size now and the can costs $20 at Walmart. There's been a 900% price increase on coffee. On coffee! On something that used to be so cheap we made a full pot and didn't care if half went down the drain!

Could be related to....I've seen a surge in coffee makers at thrift stores that work.

Possibly people reclaiming counter space since they can't afford 900% price increase on coffee since 1998, half of which happened in the past two years.

I've responded by only brewing it to about 3 cups in the morning and using the 1-4 switch on the machine then turning it right back off as soon as I pour it into a cup to prevent being gouged while a hot plate sits there idle for two hours. I laugh like a hysterical little girl (I'm a man who is 42 years old) when a package of coffee says use 2 Tbsp per cup. I then say "Yes, remove cash from wallet, set directly on fire."

But with DVDs, many people just give perfectly good movies away to thrift stores and these were films in an "enthusiast" format from the mid to late 90s, where the disc, brand new, would have cost you at least $30 back then. The fact that they have lost 90% of their value, even not adjusting for the inflation, is astounding. When you adjust for inflation, you're probably buying them at a 98-99% discount vs. their shelf price.

So much of what things cost is "just whatever the market will bear", and this is a perfect example. When people are being brutalized to pay for electric or rent, nobody can afford to be an eccentric collector that would pay $30 or $50 for a single movie anymore, no matter how good the format is. That's why UHD Blu Ray failed to achieve any significant penetration. Unlike the 1990s and mid 2000s, there's just simply no middle class left to adopt the technology, so the only market is enthusiasts, thus the price doesn't drop.

Criterion still offers a DVD option. Frankly, by being the good enough format that got to market first and is too old to have serious incompatibility issues due to malicious DRM or outrageous requirements to buy a new television every couple of years, DVD became sticky.

Its still good enough. Maybe I'm like that old Japanese guy with the blind taste test of different grades of rice cooked in different tiers of rice cooker.

He said "We survived the war, we were lucky if we had rice. Everything you can get now is good compared to that."

Only in the case of DVD, "Eh, I used video tapes for many years. Sure the technology was horrible, but everything you can get now is better compared to that."

I'm not in the mood for another enthusiast format. I was an early DVD adopter, but times and the economy have changed. The American economy is truly horrific now. How do I justify a new TV, a new player, and movies that cost $10-15 more, each, than Blu Ray and $25 more each than a DVD? I can't.

There's no longer a middle class. What they have now are people pretending to be until they get in a Chapter 13 payment plan.

In an economy that's been utterly ruined and predatory financing apps like Klarna exist so people can have some semblence of the life their paycheck used to buy, I'm just opting out of all of the parasites I can avoid. Including, as I stated before, car ownership.

It's impossible to be extracted from to view the thousands of DVDs I already own. They can't come in, raise the price I paid, take some away from me even though I'm paying every month, there's just none of that. These $150 streaming bills could buy 50 DVDs, every single month, from the thrift store. 75-100 if you go to a thrift store in a lower cost of living area.

Re: Good affordability news!

FicoMike0 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:40:13 GMT

$520 is not an outlier for a large house. My friend had a $600+ bill. That's why I suggested looking at geo.

@AndrewF is right, coffee has gone up. We've switched to K-cups, just two of us. We can each have the roast we prefer. I get costco, when it goes on sale. A few weeks ago, it was $33.99 for 120 cups. I bought four.

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:13:34 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
$520 is not an outlier for a large house. My friend had a $600+ bill. That's why I suggested looking at geo.
@AndrewF is right, coffee has gone up. We've switched to K-cups, just two of us. We can each have the roast we prefer. I get costco, when it goes on sale. A few weeks ago, it was $33.99 for 120 cups. I bought four.

I don't use the pods, but if there's a Gordon's Food Service in your area they also sell them in bulk and the price doesn't seem to be horrible considering the per-ounce upcharge for pods, and the coffee trends. They do look a bit odd.

I was using a Keurig for years but not the way you're "supposed to". I had that reusable capsule with paper filters you can put inside it. I do not like coffee that uses mesh filters, it tastes bad (and there's diterpines which paper filters out, they do affect your LDL and Triglycerides negatively and I'm already in a battle with those).

A $600 electric bill would make me have a stroke. I saw ComEd's "previous bills" and it said 1400 kilowatt hours for January. I wonder what the hell they were running in here because this building is supposed to have heat. The lease says it has radiator heat and if they're not keeping it at the legal temperature, the solution is call 311 and have the county inspector come in, not add 1,000 kilowatt hours to your electric bill.

I hope they were talking about my winter heating bill at the last apartment. Yeah, I had an electric furnace and that thing was not terribly efficient because the landlord had double pane windows, but some of the outer panes were broken, so there was no insulation value from them, and there were gaps in the door. I had to tape my front door so that it would seal out the howling winds and my neighbor's skunk weed and cheap tobacco.

The post office accidentally delivered some mail of his to my house and I ripped it open during my usual junk mail, junk mail, collection letter, bill, junk, jury duty, junk junk, bill bill.

He had a $1600 shutoff notice from Verizon and only $300 of that was a device. They left him hooked up for about a year to run the meter before charging him off.

Maybe if he was less of a weed head, he would have paid Verizon, maybe if he was smarter he wouldn't have had Verizon, or two DUIs, or a felony for beating the ex-wife, or a divorce.

Edit: I looked closer with my glasses on and it was for that last place. Christ almighty! If the only savings I get is not having to pay the entire neighborhood because of an $1150 a month slumlord, that'll just about make up for the rent here.

The only reason the air conditioner and furnace themselves were good at the last place was because under the previous administration, the landlord got a massive tax credit for upgrading those, but unless there's some sort of welfare program for slumlords like that or the CARES Act, don't count on them touching *anything*.

They'll take taxpayer money to do whatever upgrades the government is paying for, say they improved the building, increase everyone's rent, then list it "includes recently updated HVAC system and new insulation in the attic" and whatever else their worthless bum butt didn't pay for and get more money for the sale.

To recap,

The Slumlord Triple-Dip Playbook.

The Handout (Dip 1): The landlord uses federal tax credits or emergency capital improvement grants to install the new HVAC and blow some cheap insulation into the attic. Total out-of-pocket cost to their "worthless bum butt": $0.
The Rent Hike (Dip 2): The second the project is finished, they turn around to the existing tenants and say, "Good news! We just modernized the building's infrastructure. To cover the cost of these premium upgrades, your rent is going up $150 a month." They are literally charging you a premium to use an asset that you already paid for via your federal income taxes.
The Premium Cash-Out (Dip 3): When they get tired of managing the property, they put it on the market. The listing proudly screams: "Turn-key investment opportunity! Features recently updated high-efficiency HVAC and brand-new attic insulation!" A corporate buyer or another investor looks at those shiny new capital improvements, sees the inflated rent rolls, and pays a massive premium for the building.

What they don't say is that their 1970s windows and quarter-inch door gaps are causing you to use 1,400 kilowatt hours in January and you're still freezing your butt off.

They say "Tenant pays electric!"

The landlord doesn't care that the "brand new high efficiency" HVAC is spinning your meter like a top because their bill is zero. They get to brag about the "new heating system" to the city inspectors while you sit on your couch wrapped in blankets, watching 1,400 kilowatt-hours of juice evaporate into the night sky alongside your hard-earned money.

No charge for the cockroaches. They're just part of the friendly service!

Re: Good affordability news!

AndrewF — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:30:18 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
$520 is not an outlier for a large house. My friend had a $600+ bill. That's why I suggested looking at geo.
@AndrewF is right, coffee has gone up. We've switched to K-cups, just two of us. We can each have the roast we prefer. I get costco, when it goes on sale. A few weeks ago, it was $33.99 for 120 cups. I bought four.

Also, I tried a type of pod coffee at the vet while I was there with the cat, Maude's Gone Bananas Foster. Very good with half and half and splenda.

It's not a cloying unpleasant flavor like those 90s flavored coffees that my dad used to drink. I was so put off by flavored coffees that I avoided them entirely for over 30 years until I tried that one. Since they don't make it in bags, I get some from Amazon from New Orleans Roast.

Sometimes tech being crude can be a good thing, like when it's DVDs vs. streaming or those old body-on-frame cars that never broke down or were at least cheap to fix when they did, but crude tech for making flavored coffee is something I do not miss.

Re: Good affordability news!

millionsofmiles — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:27:32 GMT

@AndrewF

You have now admitted on this public forum that you knowingly obstructed the proper delivery of mail to an addressee, your landlord.

Under Federal law, obstructing correspondence…including opening, hiding, or destroying mail addressed to someone else before it reaches them…is a felony if done intentionally.

You knew the mail was addressed to your landlord…an individual you clearly despise. You opened it and read through it closely, knowing it was not intended for you.

Simply opening misdelivered mail is not criminal as long as you do not keep the mail or use the information inside.

You did both.

Re: Good affordability news!

dfwxjer — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:38:53 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
@dfwxjer
3 AC systems? Id say you have quite a house. You could probably park my house and @AndrewF 's apartment in there with room to spare.
I have a friend with a huge house. I mentioned he might consider going geo. He has the land area and owns an excavator. He's looking into it.

Well that's slightly misleading... we definitely don't have a huge house. It's 2100sq feet.

We have a unit for our upstairs, one for our downstairs, and a mini-split system in our master bedroom. We raise the temp in the rest of the house at night, and rely on the mini-split in our master to keep us cool. Historically it's kept our AC use way down compared to using a single unit to cover the entire house. The guy we bought our house from was an energy efficiency consultant so it is a bit over the top.

When the bill spiked this summer I had them all serviced and after analyzing the bill we determined they're just upping fees.

Funny enough, we were recently in Colorado visiting friends and they build their house in to the earth with geo. It was incredible how comfortable it was despite the summer heat.