Let's Learn English! Topic: Utilities and Services 🔌💡📞 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello, and welcome to this English lesson about utilities and services. So utilities and services are all of the things you pay for besides rent. When you rent an apartment or when you rent a house or when you own an apartment or own a house, there are things you need and you have to pay for them.

Obviously, there's a little bit of a hint here about what the lesson is about. You see a light bulb and a water drop and a flame, and I'm not sure what the fourth thing is. And then, of course, wi fi or Internet, you need to have a place to live, but you also need certain things, certain utilities and services in order to have an enjoyable day.

Electricity, for one, is a really cool thing to have. It allows me to have lights. It allows me to use my computer.

And the Internet, of course, allows me to teach you an English lesson. So once again, welcome to this English lesson about utilities and services. Utility bill.

Why am I starting with utility bill? Well, everything I'm going to talk about in this English lesson costs money. Okay.

And when things cost money, you get a bill. So usually these utility bills are monthly here in Canada. I think that's pretty common around the world.

There are things you need and you need to pay for them each month. So each month you will get a utility bill, you will get an electrical bill, you'll get a gas bill, you'll get an Internet bill, and you will have to then send that company, that utility company that money. I'm not sure what this bill is for, but it's $311.

62. That's pretty expensive. I hope that's not the phone bill.

That would be a little bit pricey. Anyways, utility bills, it's basically a piece of paper with your name and address and the date and an amount of money that you owe for that utility. Usually for that month, they come monthly.

And you do need to pay for electricity. We sometimes just say power. I didn't put this word on the screen, but in Ontario, Canada, some of us say hydro.

So I would say, like, I pay for hydro. But if you're learning English, just ignore that we pay for electricity or we just use the general term power. So basically you have the electric company or you have the company that generates power or electricity, and then in order to have electricity, you need to pay a monthly bill.

So you can plug in your toaster and you can plug in your computer and you can plug in your lights. Oh, the lights just went out. Yeah, that was me.

I pushed the button. Oh, and my camera was adjusting there. Anyways, electricity probably one of the most common bills that you will pay.

One of the most common utilities. By the way, I mentioned that this was about utilities and services. We tend to use the word interchangeably a bit.

Utilities are usually things like electricity. Having your garbage picked up is considered more of a service, and I'll try to keep that in mind as I teach each of these. The electricity comes into your house or apartment somewhere, and it comes into an electrical panel.

So this is a panel with circuit breakers in it. If it's really old, it might have fuses in it, but this is where your electricity comes into, uh, your apartment or your house. Um, sometimes, like when I turned the light off, if it wasn't me turning it off, it might have been a breaker tripping in the basement.

And, uh, we sometimes call them trips as well. You probably have a phone. If you have a phone, you probably have a phone plan.

In order to use your phone, you have to pay someone so that it is connected to, to the phone network. Maybe you have an old fashioned phone. Maybe you have a new phone like most of us do.

In order for me to use my phone, there is a SiM card in my phone, a little card, and that allows my phone to connect. Who am I connected to? Telus, I think, is the company.

So I pay them a certain amount of money every month. I think about $50 a month so that I can use this phone to make phone calls, to text, and to use the Internet. I have both the ability to phone text and I have a data plan.

By the way, if I'm talking too fast, it's from lack of sleep. Sorry about that. Anyways, you need a phone plan.

In order to use a phone, you need to be connected to the phone network. So you will decide what phone plan do I want? How much data do I need every month?

Do I want unlimited calling minutes? Do I want the ability to send an unlimited amount of texts? So that is what you would do.

And that is one of your utilities. If you have an old fashioned phone, it's probably connected to the wall, and then a wire or cable goes out to the phone company. Water.

You do definitely need water. You need drinking water. Or I call it, I think I say potable water, but someone told me it's potable water.

So don't learn your pronunciation from me for that one. But you need drinking water. You need water to cook with.

You need clean water in your house so that you have something to drink. You have something. If you want to boil some eggs, you have something that you can use to wash the dishes, you need water.

So you will get a water bill every month. Because I live out in the country, I actually buy my water and it comes in a truck, and we pick up our drinking water in two town with large blue jugs. I think I've showed you those before.

I don't have one sitting by me right now. We sometimes also refer to it as running water, especially if you rent a cabin. In northern Canada, you can rent a cabin with running water, or it might not have running water.

That means you will have to bring water with you in bottles or jugs. So water, running water. And I used the term drinking water as well, a common way to refer to water.

There are two things there. Sorry, let's talk about just this one thing. In order to have water, your country or your city or your town must have a water treatment plant.

If I go to the tap to get a glass of water, to drink it, it has to be clean drinking water. In order to do that, the water goes through a water treatment plant. They take it from a lake or river, it gets cleaned and disinfected and sanitized and filtered, and many things happen.

I don't know if you can see all the words, but at one end you have water from the lake. At the other end, hopefully you have clean, safe drinking water. I think if we make this bigger, the, there are some really big words on there that even I don't know.

But this is the process for creating drinking water, a water treatment plant. You also have what's called sewer. When I lived in town, my water bill and my sewer bill were the same bill.

In some towns in Canada, your sewer bill is based on the amount of water that you use. So if you use a certain number of liters of water per month, you're charged for the water. But then you're also charged a sewer fee for the water, because basically any water that comes in your house goes down the drain or the toilet at some point.

But you pay for sewer. I'm not sure how much this costs in Canada, but certainly you pay for water to come into your home, into your apartment or house, and then you pay for sewer, so that when you flush the toilet, it goes through the pipes and it goes away to the wastewater treatment plant. So in Canada and in many parts of the world, you have water treatment plants to create good water, but then you also have wastewater treatment plants.

And this is where all of your sewage, all of the water that goes down the drain will end up here, and then it will go through a process where it is again filtered and cleaned to a certain amount, and then it is let out into a lake or river once it is safe to do so. Once it's been, you know, all of the solids have been removed and it's been treated. And it's not drinking water when they're done, but it's certainly safe to release into the environment.

You will probably pay for natural gas or gas or propane or some type of gas that you can use for cooking and for heating water. In my part of the world, it's usually natural gas or what's called propane. And when you have this, you can then cook.

Okay. We actually use electricity to cook, but my sister has a gas stove, and at school we have gas stoves. I think we have gas stoves.

I should check where you have an actual flame. You're using an actual flame to cook? Um, some people also heat their houses with natural gas or propane.

Our house is heated with propane. If you're wondering what propane is, it's just another form of burnable gas. Okay.

Don't know a lot about it, except that I have a big tank out there filled with propane, and that's what goes into my furnace. And it makes a flame and it heats my house. But yes, you'll.

You will get a gas bill. You have to pay. You have to pay the gas bill every month, or they might turn off the gas, and then you don't have anything to heat your house or apartment or home.

That's not very nice when that happens. And here is my. A picture of a furnace.

This. I was going to say my furnace. This isn't.

Well, it's pretty close to looking like my furnace. A furnace is used for heat. Sometimes we say you have to pay for gas and electricity, but we sometimes just say, oh, I have to pay my heating bill.

I have to pay for heat and electricity and water. So you can say that you have to pay the gas bill or the natural gas bill, or you just have to pay your heat bill. Cable tv, satellite tv.

There are different ways to pay for a tv service. So if you want to watch tv, you can hook up an antenna in Canada, and you will have four or five channels for free. Like, you can put an antenna on your roof, or you can pay for cable tv.

If you're in a city, there will actually be a cable tv wire that comes into your house. I guess technically it's a cable. There will be a cable that comes into your house, and you will pay a monthly fee, and you will get a certain number of tv channels, depending on how much you pay.

If you live out in the country like I do, you can get satellite tv. They will put a satellite dish on your house, and then from there it's basically the same as cable. But, but instead of a cable coming into your house, you're getting the signal from a satellite up in orbit here.

Cable tv isn't too pricey. I think it's about 30, $40 a month if you want cable tv, satellite tv is a little more expensive. But where I live, I buy satellite tv because again, if I hook an antenna up, I think I get four channels really good.

And I like having a few more channels than that. And then, yes, I do have a satellite dish on my house. I will show you where that is in a video at some point, probably on my shorter channel, maybe when I do the lesson.

By the way, there's no video coming out on my short English lesson channel today. I'm just going to pick that up again next Wednesday. So.

But yes, you can have cable tv, you can have a satellite tv, and you will have a satellite dish if you need that type of service. All of us obviously have Internet. Somehow you are watching this on the Internet.

You must have Internet, an Internet connection in your house or in your apartment in order to browse the web. I don't know if we still use either of those terms. In order to watch YouTube, in order to download games or to play games, you need an Internet connection.

And obviously you need to pay for that. Now, there's two ways to get an Internet connection. Currently, this is my home Internet connection, but I also have a data plan on my phone.

So I can use the Internet on my phone, or I can sit at a computer or use my tablet and use my home Internet connection here. A home Internet connection is about, if you were in the city, about $40 a month canadian for me, much more. My Internet connection is $268 a month.

Yeah, out here on the farm, dollar, 268 a month. I could get a cheaper plan, but then I wouldn't be able to live stream. So in order to have home Internet, you must have a router somewhere in your house or apartment.

A router is a small box, and the Internet connection goes into the box, and then you can plug other computers into it, or it generates a Wi Fi signal so that you can use Internet wirelessly throughout your home. But yes, if you would like to use the Internet, you need to pay someone in order to have an Internet connection. And there's something called a bundle.

Um, because home phone and Internet and tv all, some of them all come on the same cable, or it can come on the same cable. You can get all of it from the same company sometimes. And this is called a bundle.

So I could get a bundle. I could actually bundle my mobile phone, my home phone, my Internet, and my tv altogether. But it's not.

It wouldn't work well for me because the Internet connection isn't the one I need for live streaming. But if you want to save some money, you can buy all of those services from the same company, and they will give you a discount. A discount means you pay a little bit less.

So that's called a bundle. If you go to a fast food restaurant, you can buy a combo drink, fries, hamburger. But when you buy Internet, tv, and phone, we call it a bundle.

We wouldn't call it a combo. You might call it a package. They might have a good package for you.

You might have a security system. We have a lot of security systems in our businesses. Some people have security systems in their home.

A security system can be as simple as if someone opens a door, an alarm goes off, but it might also be monitored. When you have a security system that is monitored, it means that if someone breaks into your home, it alerts someone at the monitoring center so they can call the police. They can call you on your phone to let you know that someone is breaking into your house.

So a security system might not have a monthly fee, but if you are paying someone to monitor it, you might be paying a monthly fee, so that if something happens, they give you a call or they call the police. If you're old, you might have a medical alert system. This lady, it looks like she's being taught how to use her pendant.

There's probably a button on it. If she falls or if she's not feeling strong enough to stand up, she might be able to push that button, and then it will alert someone to come and help her. So we would call that a medical alert system.

And it's generally used by people maybe in their seventies or eighties. Usually, if they live by themselves, they might have this. If you have a medical condition and you live by yourself, you might have a medical alert.

Um, pendant. It's like a button that you can push, or there might just be a button somewhere in your house. And then, of course, we have garbage or trash and recycling.

I I made this all look like the same thing, but it's different. Garbage and trash are the same things. The things you throw out.

Recycling is the things you throw out, but you want them to be used again? Okay. Um.

So this might be included in your taxes. Like, for me, this is just included in my taxes. Or you might have to pay a separate bill.

When I was young, we took our garbage to the dump and we had to pay to bring the garbage there. I know in some of your countries, garbage and recycling is completely free, but that is one other expense, one other service that you need to have each month because you can't just let your garbage pile up. That would be a really, really bad thing.

Snow removal. You might not have this where you live. You might have sand removal where you live.

I don't know how things work. I saw pictures of really big sand storms hitting a city once, and it looked a lot like a snowstorm, except it was sand. But here in Canada, when it snows, you either have to shovel it yourself or you might pay for snow removal.

I do my own snow. I have shovels and tractors and things like that. But people who live in the city might pay for a snow removal service.

So a person will come in a big truck with a blade on the front, and they will plow your driveway. Yeah, I'm trying to think this. Like we say, this is a.

They plow your driveway. It's an interesting word, snowplow. Yeah.

So they'll come and they'll do snow removal. They might have a snow blower that shoots the snow. They might have a tractor with a loader to lift and remove the snow.

But you might need to pay for snow removal. Oh, yeah, this is a good one. Okay.

You might have rent. That includes utilities. You might have rent with utilities not included.

So in Canada, this isn't always true, but generally when you rent an apartment, the utilities are included. You pay one fee for everything. So it's rent, heat, electricity.

You probably have to pay for Internet and tv separately. So when it says rents included, it says all utilities included. So this might actually include Internet and tv, although I think that's rare.

But you also have a situation where you might rent an apartment or house and utilities are not included. So you pay rent, but then here you also have to pay extra for electricity and Internet, et cetera, et cetera. So what I was going to say, though, is in Canada, often when you rent an apartment, utilities are included.

But if you rent a house, you have to pay for the utilities. Again, that's not always true. It's just the most common way for it to happen.

Water lines and sewer lines. So when water comes into your house or apartment, it has to come from somewhere. If you go out into the street and dig, don't actually do this, but if you go and dig, you will find a water line or a water main.

Technically, the water line runs from your house to the water main. And the water main is a really big pipe that's usually under the road or along your street or road. So that.

That's how the water gets to your house, through a water main or water line. Now, we do use these terms interchangeably because we're not all experts, but, uh, the. When water comes to your house, it comes through a water line or water main, um, which are pipes.

When water leaves your house, when you flush the toilet, or when you. When water goes down the drain, it goes through a sewer line to a sewer maintained, it goes off to the wastewater treatment plant. And then we have things called manholes or maintenance holes.

Sometimes they have to fix the pipes that are underground, they have to go into the manhole or maintenance hole, and they have to fix a leak. Or hopefully, it's not the sewer pipe. That probably smells really, really bad, but definitely there are times where they have to go fix things and they need to get access.

If you drive around, you will see utility poles in Canada. In my part of Canada, we call them hydro poles. In some places, they're called power poles or electrical poles.

But utility pole is probably the best term. You actually might be surprised what's all on this utility pole. I think these are actually Internet or phone wires.

I think the very top wires are probably electricity. I'm not sure. These might be cable tv or electricity or phone or Internet as well.

Often a utility pole will have multiple things on it. This one's pretty full. This is a lot of stuff, but I'm pretty sure this is cable tv.

And I'm pretty sure the top is electricity, and maybe the middle is some. Something else. And then we have.

The lines are actually called power lines. That's what I would refer to those as the power lines at the top of the utility pole, if you're lucky, you might have a backup generator. I have a generator, but it's not like this one.

This is an automatic backup generator. If the power goes out, if the electricity goes out of this has an engine in it that runs off natural gas or gasoline, and it automatically starts and makes electricity for your house. So very cool.

My backup generator is just on wheels, and I have to drive it somewhere, and then I have to pull it. Actually, my. I don't have to pull it.

I has electric start. I have an older, smaller one that you have to pull start. But a backup generator makes electricity when the power goes out.

That is its job. There's also something called off grid. So I'm definitely on grid, so I am connected to the electrical grid.

When you are off grid, it means that you must make your own electricity. It sometimes means as well that you do not have running water and you might not have sewer. But generally when we talk about the grid, we're talking about electricity.

When we talk about off grid, it means you don't have, there's no wire coming from a utility pole to your house or cabin or apartment. So you are off grid. And then it usually extends to also mean that you don't have running water.

You probably have to bring your own water. If you went to a place like this, you would need to bring some bottles of water. And then the people who work on this are called utility workers.

They might install utilities, they might do maintenance on utilities, they might repair utilities. But a utility worker is someone who climbs utility poles. They sometimes dig in the ground to fix wires or pipes that are underground.

A utility worker is the person or the people who make all of this stuff work. We actually owe them a lot, by the way. The world works well because of these people.

So thank you. If you're a utility worker, you're awesome. Thank you for the electricity and the water and the sewage, sewer pipes and everything that you take care of.