Television, Internet, and Utility Services Update

I wanted to hit on a few more comparisons to things we had back home. Like the last post about grocery shopping, we have a little better feel for other aspects of German living now that we are about six months in.

Residential Internet Service:
This was a big concern pre-move for us, Cindy and the kids included. Back in Allen we had some decent Internet service and a pretty large home network. I think at last count we had over 50 devices that needed an IP address and Internet connectivity. Computers, tablets, mobile phones, audio video components, wireless speaker systems, light switches; you know, the regular stuff. I was never completely satisfied with our AT&T Uverse service, but it was manageable. Remember I sold business grade Internet and WAN connectivity for my job so residential Internet service was always going to be disappointing. But moving to Germany, what were we going to end up with, and how much is it going to cost us? Well, after a few months in our house I can say that I am more pleased with Kabel Deutschland Internet service for both price and performance compared to AT&T. It is crazy how cheap the Internet service is here. I think the plan that I am on is 19.99 euro for the first year then 29.99 for the second year. It includes the router, 100Mb Internet service, and also a telephone land line.

Texas is famous for taxing the heck out of telephone lines for residential and businesses. I think you pay about $20 a month just in taxes and fees to have a land line, much less the cost of the line itself before taxes and fees. You do have to pay for usage on the line, but we really only need it in case of emergency. The Internet service has been really good, and it is a good thing. I can tell you why below.

Cable/Satellite Television Service:
We had no clue what we were going to do about this prior to moving. Once we got here and landed in our temporary apartment it already had television service set up. All German, all of the time, and rightfully so. After turning on the television once or twice and "flicking" through the channels over and over the TV did not turn on much after that. I tried out the German equivalent to Netflix with the Amazon owned lovefilm.de service. It is a streaming plus DVD service that you pay a monthly subscription to use. It did not last long. I really thought that I would be able to stream original English programming in English, I really thought that would be an option. It turns out that lovefilm.de is only licensed to offer its programming with German voice dubbing, the English version was not offered. We ordered a couple of DVD's that had English as an option on the DVD itself, but it was quickly realized that this subscription service was not worth it.

I then read and heard about Sky satellite service. Sky UK is only licensed to broadcast to residents of the UK. They offer English programming from UK and the USA, they even have the same shows that HBO and Showtime premium services broadcast available. There is a huge gray market of people that still get the service outside of the UK. There are companies set up that will sell you the satellite dish and DVR's, then set up a subscription service with a bogus UK address and send you the satellite card. The monthly service cost on this is reasonable but you have a large cash layout for the equipment up front. Sky Deutschland was also recently made available for German customers, but it has the same licensing issue only offering programming in German. The cable services were also 95% German programming, and I didn't want to pay for that.

Eventually I decided to try getting all of my television entertainment from the Internet. I have a VPN service that makes it look like I am located in the USA for some of the networks that only allow streaming content within the country. Recently that has been hard to get with ABC limiting its content to users that have specific cable service providers. DirecTV is not even an option with ABC right now. I also subscribed to Netflix, the end of the 2013 MLB Baseball service to keep up with the Rangers, and the NFL service that gives me all of the games plus the playoffs and Superbowl. Overall it was working pretty well, I was always able to find a way to watch anything that we wanted to see. I had a couple of subscription services, but it was still way less per month than my DirecTV bill in Allen. That was a few months ago, now things have changes.

Oh, the glorious Internet, how I love thee. I have located some Internet links that allow me to watch almost anything that I want to see, free of charge with no monthly subscriptions, no VPN connections. There are a couple of "broker sites" that provide links to various content providers for any television show and movie past or present. With my wonderful 100Mb Internet connection I can stream any episode of any season of any television show you can think of on demand. One site even has links to movies that are still only in theaters. I don't know how they do it, but there they are. Now in some cases they are posting links of some guy holding a personal video camera in the theater where the audio and video are really bad. I don't mess with those, they are really bad. For most movies they have been able to get DVD quality links posted and available for streaming. Suddenly I feel like I am giving out too much information.....hhhmmmm.....well, I don't really watch any of this, I just know about it. Moving on.....

Other Utility Services:
So far so good, right. Internet, telephone, and television service are much cheaper than back home. What about electrical, gas, and other utility services? Our gas and electric is included in our monthly rent for our home. There is an allowance built in and we will only pay more if we go over the allowance. Based on input from our relocation consultant I think we have a good buffer built in. It is normal for a tenant to pay for electrical and gas separate though. This was something that we thought of and negotiated into our lease. The gas usage for us is similar to what we used it for back home. There is an old school water heater that uses gas and the heating system is also gas. There are a couple of different heating options that various houses in Germany use, but I think the type in this house is the most common. There is a separate furnace and plumbing system that heats water, which travels to the radiators that are located in each room. The temperature for a given room is based on how much you open up the specific radiator for that room. The heated water travels in a big circle all the way around the house back into the furnace heating area. It is common practice to only use the furnace during the day. I am told that most homes have the furnace shut off around 22:00 for the night. It comes back on at 06:00 the next morning. This seems counter intuitive to me since you are home at night and it is the coldest time of the day, but who am I to argue with common practices. I set ours to stay on a little later and come on a little earlier. Also, there is a temperature sensor outside that is supposed to automatically adjust how hot the water needs to get to keep the temperatures high enough indoors. That sensor for this house has been broken and they have been trying to get it fixed. So far we have had a very mild winter and it has not been a problem. The water heats to between 40-50 degrees Celsius. If it got really cold it would need to heat more to provide enough warmth to the house. I am still learning about the electrical and mechanical systems in this house. Overall it is very different than houses that I have lived in before.

The trash system is pretty crazy. I have four trash cans in front of the house used for separating out types of trash. They are not very large containers compared to what we had in Allen.

In Allen the trash was picked up weekly and the one recycle bin, for all recyclable material, was picked up every two weeks on the same day. The biggest issue for me is not have a 1 horsepower garbage disposal in the sink, or any disposal in the sink. We really miss our super large double sink with garbage disposal. Here everyone has a single sink with a food trap. Back home we have one sink with bubbles and water to wash your dishes and another sink to rinse the clean dishes. Doing dishes here is a bit more of a challenge. Thankfully we do have a really nice kitchen compared to most other German kitchens. Our American landlords put in a pretty large sink and there is an area to place the dishes that need to be rinsed. Wait, I am getting off track, back to the trash discussion. You are not allowed to have garbage disposals here. You are supposed to separate out food into a bio bin. Our trash area below our sink had three very small bins built into it. From the sink or directly from plates we put our food waste into one of those bins, lined with a plastic sack and a lid. When that gets full, or smelly whichever comes first, you take it outside to the brown lid trash can. This is picked up once a week by the city service. We hear that you are not supposed to put bones or egg shells in the bio bin. That goes into the regular trash. Small bin number two we use for our paper trash. We have a blue lid trash can in front of the house dedicated to clean paper waste. Boxes, packaging from grocery items, etc. This is only picked up once every two weeks, and we fill it up pretty quickly. In fact with all of my Amazon.de shopping I have a backlog of boxes that I need to get rid of. The larger bin below our sink is for general garbage, used paper towels, plastic that is not recyclable, etc. When that gets full we put it into the black trash can outside. It is also only picked up once every two weeks and is usually very full. Trash can number four has a yellow lid. To date, my understanding for this dedicated trash can is for recyclable plastic items only. Most of our glass and plastic bottles we take back to the grocery store because we pay a deposit on them. When we take them back we get the deposit back. There are some plastic containers that do not have a deposit, those go in the yellow bin. This one is also once every two weeks, but it is usually pretty empty. Guess what, we are not done sorting trash yet. What about glass containers that do not have deposits paid on them? Recently I was told that you are supposed to take these to the neighborhood glass collection areas. Down the street and around the corner from us there are three glass collection bins for green, brown, and clear colored glass items. Overall I think we do a pretty good job of following the trash rules. We are told that we do not have to separate our trash, but we are trying to do it the right way. If we just tried to keep everything in the regular trash bin our black trash can would be way overflowing each week. In a way I think we do have to separate it out just to not have an issue with it stacking up too much. I was also keeping the various trash cans away from the street, more out of sight in the beginning. I cannot keep up with the schedule of when each of the different bins will be collected. It does not seem to be very consistent it they are all on different days. So my solution was just to relocate them to the street like most everyone else in the neighborhood. Some have a storage area next to the street to keep them out of site, but most people just have them out in the open, ready for pick up.

So overall I think our utility and monthly service costs have been reduced from what we pay in Allen. It is a good thing because we make up for it in other areas. Next time I will talk about some of those expenses. We are getting to understand some of these less common happenings and how they affect the bottom line. In the meantime, don't be shipping us any items worth more than 45 euros!! I will tell you why next week, along with some of the ways we are missing home (mostly food related) and how we are coping with it.