That too, but some jurisdictions put some guardrails for pulling full prior permits, when I wanted to pull all the historical permits for my house for my own records, I had to bring in some proof that I was either the owner, tenant or other interested party (like say a contractor who want to see the previous permits before doing their own work)
Where I am in Germany, not only do they know all of that, but they come out every year to check it. This year, they showed up several days before they said they were going to, but when the guy walked in, he looked around, and then gave us a bunch of information about dealing with slum lords, lol.
Are you perhaps confusing that with the heating meter checkers in appartment buildings? They actually need the living area for the billing and have a contract to do so with your landslumlord, and thereby you.
Regarding the slumlord: The magic word is generally “Mietminderung”, I think.
I’m not confusing it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about! They’re employed by the utility company in my city and contracted through the landlord. Are they completely independent from the utility company elsewhere?
The apartment is not actually a huge problem, slightly better than a standard student apartment, it’s more that the guy was just drive-by judging my life.
Typically you have a contract with the electricity company yourself, not via the landlord.
He typically doesn’t know and doesn’t care from whom (or if at all) you get your electricity.
Yours might be a special arrangement because of being a student apartment.
I have no idea how uncommon this is here and hope I’m not doxxing myself, but there’s only been one option (the city itself) in the ten+ apartments my husband and I have lived in in this city for water, electricity, and heat (though obviously there are options for using pellet stoves and similar things, but that doesn’t come up much in apartments), so I don’t know if I live in a weird place or if there’s just one city office exchange that serves as a middleman for multiple options.
Or I might just be misinterpreting you and you meant things like pellet stoves, fireplaces, etc. I guess I would have thought the Schornsteinfeger would have reported the heating method for your home to the city.
It’s not technically a student apartment, but it’s right next to campus and we’re definitely the first married couple to live there.
While it is pretty common for heating (as it is mostly centralized either in the building complex or even city district and you’re stuck with it), it is very uncommon for electricity.
There is something called the “Grundtarif” of the local electricity provider that it just defaults to, but you are not forced to keep it.
This might very likely be it.
You could just try to look up your meter ID and try to switch to a different provider (can really easily be done online).
If that just works, great!
I would in this case really recommend using it, as the Grundtarif usually is the most expensive option you can get, so you could save a lot of money.
Besides what others have said, they’d know the capabilities of the address when it’s built, at a minimum, as they’re responsible for providing the infrastructure to deliver power to it.
I really don’t get why you’re asking this - they need to know what a facility is capable of to manage and plan power delivery.
As an aside, graphs like this are wildly wrong. Mine says the comparison is made between residences from 0.5 to 1.5 times the size of mine, within a 7 mile radius. So it includes apartments downtown who’s heat is steam, and each unit insulates each other, and the building has a dozen to 100 bodies in it, heating it up.
they need to know what a facility is capable of to manage and plan power delivery.
But that’s a single value measured in Ampere.
The size in square feet is something completely irrelevant to know.
And even the Ampere value is only relevant for the local provider that connects to your house, not for the company selling you the actual electric energy.
The company selling me electricity knows nothing about me but my electric meter ID.
Lighting load on new construction homes is calculated based on square footage.
That doesn’t even make sense as it treads someone just putting up a single 5W bulb the same as someone having an indoor hemp plantation or heavy machine shop in their basement.
Well the NEC still uses wattages from old incandescent bulbs for general lighting load calcs, plus there’s always a reasonable amount of overspeccing built into the calculation.
You would then add any large loads specifically. Clothes drier, oven, fridge, HVAC, anything that comes with a nameplate wattage rating should be included in the load calc.
Most utilities these days will also just round up to a 200A service for anything larger than a trailer. Big houses would get multiples of 200A services if needed.
(USA) My flat just had its tax assessment done and that includes the floor area, heating source, and other things like how fancy your kitchen is (mine is “standard”, btw). That tax assessment is available online to everyone.
Yep. For example, search for parcel “176-194-030” in the Hartford, CT tax assessor’s search. It should bring up a McDonald’s fast food building (I chose that because it’s less creepy than singling out some random person’s home.)
There’s even a little drawing of the building. The purple is the first floor and the blue is the “canopy” or, I guess, awning outside. The “interior” tab on this site doesn’t list the kitchen quality, but does say the insulation is “typical” and 40% of the building has sprinklers. My guess is different cities and towns track different things in their tax assessments.
Oh! IIRC, Germany has the thing where the kitchen doesn’t stay with the house. In the USA, they’re firmly attached.
Coming from a country where even the streetview pictures have to be blurred if the people living there wish so, this uncompromising publication of people’s home information is totally fascinating!
And also I am wondering now, what a half and a 3/4 bath is… ;-)
BTW: While it is true, that the kitchen is not part of a German house or flat, it nonetheless typically is also firmly attached (big screws into our rather solid brick walls).
And contrary to exaggerating Youtube-clips, in most cases it stays and is privately and quietly sold by one tenant to the next, out of obvious practical considerations.
Also because of the “does not belong to the building” rule, when buying a home, it is a good idea to estimate the value of an existing kitchen at the upper end and reduce the official price for the rest of the home accordingly, thereby reducing the estate sales tax by a few bucks. (Sales tax is only for the building, and the kitchen does not belong to the building, so…)
a half bath is a toilet+sink. A 3/4 bath is a toilet, sink, and shower (but not a tub).
3/4 bath can be fuzzy: if it’s the only bathroom in the home, it will often be called a full bath.
I’m not sure if we had to pay an estate sales tax when we bought this place. We pay town taxes every 6 months automatically through our mortgage. We also paid a recording fee for the town to record the condo sale. There were a lot of fees, tbh.
And yes, you got me, I heard about German kitchens from YouTube.
Overall buyer fees are unfortunately quite high in Germany, can be up to ~10% of the property price. Add to that the fact that houses or flats are generally more expensive than in the States, you quickly have additional costs of 50000€ or more (would be roughly the same in $) even for a small estate, which you can not cover by the credit, but have to pay in liquid cash.
This is a major hurdle for many and a likely part of the reason why so many people live in rented apartments here instead of buying.
It seems very common in the US to get these mailed by the supplier. This one seems to be a blueprint for National Grid, and is similar to a post from this house light show co. on Facebook
Why does the electricity company know your flat size and your heating source?
In most places in the US, basic home specs are public record and/or just floating around since the last time it was publicly listed for sale
I bet you can look at the building permit and learn this stuff
That too, but some jurisdictions put some guardrails for pulling full prior permits, when I wanted to pull all the historical permits for my house for my own records, I had to bring in some proof that I was either the owner, tenant or other interested party (like say a contractor who want to see the previous permits before doing their own work)
Wow. That idea is definitely 2American4me…
(I also just posted it in the respective community, as it fits perfectly there…)
Where I am in Germany, not only do they know all of that, but they come out every year to check it. This year, they showed up several days before they said they were going to, but when the guy walked in, he looked around, and then gave us a bunch of information about dealing with slum lords, lol.
Are you perhaps confusing that with the heating meter checkers in appartment buildings? They actually need the living area for the billing and have a contract to do so with your
landslumlord, and thereby you.Regarding the slumlord: The magic word is generally “Mietminderung”, I think.
I’m not confusing it, that’s exactly what I’m talking about! They’re employed by the utility company in my city and contracted through the landlord. Are they completely independent from the utility company elsewhere?
The apartment is not actually a huge problem, slightly better than a standard student apartment, it’s more that the guy was just drive-by judging my life.
Typically you have a contract with the electricity company yourself, not via the landlord.
He typically doesn’t know and doesn’t care from whom (or if at all) you get your electricity.
Yours might be a special arrangement because of being a student apartment.
I have no idea how uncommon this is here and hope I’m not doxxing myself, but there’s only been one option (the city itself) in the ten+ apartments my husband and I have lived in in this city for water, electricity, and heat (though obviously there are options for using pellet stoves and similar things, but that doesn’t come up much in apartments), so I don’t know if I live in a weird place or if there’s just one city office exchange that serves as a middleman for multiple options.
Or I might just be misinterpreting you and you meant things like pellet stoves, fireplaces, etc. I guess I would have thought the Schornsteinfeger would have reported the heating method for your home to the city.
It’s not technically a student apartment, but it’s right next to campus and we’re definitely the first married couple to live there.
While it is pretty common for heating (as it is mostly centralized either in the building complex or even city district and you’re stuck with it), it is very uncommon for electricity.
There is something called the “Grundtarif” of the local electricity provider that it just defaults to, but you are not forced to keep it.
This might very likely be it.
You could just try to look up your meter ID and try to switch to a different provider (can really easily be done online).
If that just works, great!
I would in this case really recommend using it, as the Grundtarif usually is the most expensive option you can get, so you could save a lot of money.
Besides what others have said, they’d know the capabilities of the address when it’s built, at a minimum, as they’re responsible for providing the infrastructure to deliver power to it.
I really don’t get why you’re asking this - they need to know what a facility is capable of to manage and plan power delivery.
As an aside, graphs like this are wildly wrong. Mine says the comparison is made between residences from 0.5 to 1.5 times the size of mine, within a 7 mile radius. So it includes apartments downtown who’s heat is steam, and each unit insulates each other, and the building has a dozen to 100 bodies in it, heating it up.
That makes for a completly irrelevant comparison.
But that’s a single value measured in Ampere.
The size in square feet is something completely irrelevant to know.
And even the Ampere value is only relevant for the local provider that connects to your house, not for the company selling you the actual electric energy.
The company selling me electricity knows nothing about me but my electric meter ID.
Lighting load on new construction homes is calculated based on square footage.
That doesn’t even make sense as it treads someone just putting up a single 5W bulb the same as someone having an indoor hemp plantation or heavy machine shop in their basement.
Well the NEC still uses wattages from old incandescent bulbs for general lighting load calcs, plus there’s always a reasonable amount of overspeccing built into the calculation.
You would then add any large loads specifically. Clothes drier, oven, fridge, HVAC, anything that comes with a nameplate wattage rating should be included in the load calc.
Most utilities these days will also just round up to a 200A service for anything larger than a trailer. Big houses would get multiples of 200A services if needed.
(USA) My flat just had its tax assessment done and that includes the floor area, heating source, and other things like how fancy your kitchen is (mine is “standard”, btw). That tax assessment is available online to everyone.
Soooo… there are openly available public databases containing information on how fancy a kitchen you own…?
On one hand that’s completely hilarious.
On the other hand that’s frighteningly dystopian.
To say it with the latest officially elected German youth word: “Das crazy.”
Yep. For example, search for parcel “176-194-030” in the Hartford, CT tax assessor’s search. It should bring up a McDonald’s fast food building (I chose that because it’s less creepy than singling out some random person’s home.)
There’s even a little drawing of the building. The purple is the first floor and the blue is the “canopy” or, I guess, awning outside. The “interior” tab on this site doesn’t list the kitchen quality, but does say the insulation is “typical” and 40% of the building has sprinklers. My guess is different cities and towns track different things in their tax assessments.
Oh! IIRC, Germany has the thing where the kitchen doesn’t stay with the house. In the USA, they’re firmly attached.
Coming from a country where even the streetview pictures have to be blurred if the people living there wish so, this uncompromising publication of people’s home information is totally fascinating!
And also I am wondering now, what a half and a 3/4 bath is… ;-)
BTW: While it is true, that the kitchen is not part of a German house or flat, it nonetheless typically is also firmly attached (big screws into our rather solid brick walls).
And contrary to exaggerating Youtube-clips, in most cases it stays and is privately and quietly sold by one tenant to the next, out of obvious practical considerations.
Also because of the “does not belong to the building” rule, when buying a home, it is a good idea to estimate the value of an existing kitchen at the upper end and reduce the official price for the rest of the home accordingly, thereby reducing the estate sales tax by a few bucks. (Sales tax is only for the building, and the kitchen does not belong to the building, so…)
a half bath is a toilet+sink. A 3/4 bath is a toilet, sink, and shower (but not a tub). 3/4 bath can be fuzzy: if it’s the only bathroom in the home, it will often be called a full bath.
I’m not sure if we had to pay an estate sales tax when we bought this place. We pay town taxes every 6 months automatically through our mortgage. We also paid a recording fee for the town to record the condo sale. There were a lot of fees, tbh.
And yes, you got me, I heard about German kitchens from YouTube.
Overall buyer fees are unfortunately quite high in Germany, can be up to ~10% of the property price. Add to that the fact that houses or flats are generally more expensive than in the States, you quickly have additional costs of 50000€ or more (would be roughly the same in $) even for a small estate, which you can not cover by the credit, but have to pay in liquid cash.
This is a major hurdle for many and a likely part of the reason why so many people live in rented apartments here instead of buying.
It seems very common in the US to get these mailed by the supplier. This one seems to be a blueprint for National Grid, and is similar to a post from this house light show co. on Facebook