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.