i hear you. i had the same thing happen (electric, phone, cable, food, etc). i was never around the apartment much anyways. but, we still split everything. what pissed me off the most is the food situation. we would split the cost of groceries, but i would not see much of the food.

living alone is so much better.

For this incident, you're stuck. Your agreement was to split the utilities evenly. And you should still pay your share of "normal" electric and gas bills even though you weren't there.

But you should make a new agreement going forward, regarding excess use of utilities by one person. If one roommate insists on going through electricity like there's no tomorrow, she should cough up some extra $ - especially if nobody else benefited, as in the case of the space heater.

I know! That's what it felt like when we walked in the door. She had never lived on her own and had never paid bills so she had no idea how expensive it would be.

The weird thing is my co-op blasts the heat. We don't have a thermostat so we can't control, but the thermometer reads about 80 degrees. I wind up wearing t-shirts and shorts in my apartment because it is so hot.

The same thing happened at my boyfriends apartment over the summer, except it was the other way around. His roommates left the AC on full blast ALL OF THE TIME! It's not that difficult to turn it off at night and just open up the windows. Especially with how much it cools off in California at night. He was pretty ticked off, because he had to pay about $75 more when he was barely there that month.

Technically I would agree with you.

If you were there less than half of the month, but miraculously your bills were way higher, I don't think it's fair to you to have to pay that much more.

It's just like the analogy that someone else used: if someone washed/dried 100 loads of laundry, that's not fair to the person who didn't do any of that. (of course I would hope that they are getting their laundry done somewhere else or just buying new clothes b/c then they would be stinky :p)

With my last roomie, her boyfriend was over ALL THE TIME. Even when neither of us were home. I didn't have a problem with it at all b/c he was a cool cat, but he ran up the bills like no one's business. I had a talk w/ my roomie about it and of course she got upset with me, but if he's there all the time (wasn't going to college and didn't have anywhere else to be) it is kind of like having a third roomie that's just always there.

You also then have to be prepared for them to start getting nit picky with you over your usage of things. Do you want them to time your showers to figure out percentages of the water bill? Might there be some time that you are using more than them?

Figuring out this kind of stuff is good practice for compromise and learning to negotiate with people though. Consider it a lesson learned!

The first year I lived with two of my sorority sisters, one of them proposed that we try to eat dinners together. We would take turns grocery shopping and just pay the bill for when we shopped. It worked out great for myself and my sister-daughter, because we had the same types of eating habits. However, the roommate who proposed this ate nothing but yogurt and rice, so when she did the shopping, that's all that was in the house. We had to rearrange that agreement for the future.

Consider it good practice for when your spouse leaves the natural gas grill on for 3 weeks and you get a huge bill... (yeah, that happened to us. He left it on after cooking one night in October and in November, when it was snowing, I noticed steam rising from the lid as the snow flakes fell on it and reamed him out!)

Dee

First tell your roommate to ditch the space heater. Not only do they soak up energy, but they are a HUGE fire hazard if left unattended. Central heat is cheaper. However, I understand if you live in an old school house in downtown that doesn't have that.

This kind of reminds me of a situation with my old roommate. My roommate moved into our new apartment about a month before I did. During that month, she went on a 2 week vacation, worked 8 hours a day when she got back and spent the remaining hours with her boyfriend at his place. Needless to say, there was no power running through that apartment for a month or two. Except maybe the fridge. Our bill was like $15. Once school started and we both lived there full time. Our bill raised an extra $10. The roommate started flipping out saying that this $10 increase was all my computer's fault. Nevermind that there were now two people living there full time with 2 T.Vs, the air conditioner running, the stove, microwave, etc instead of no one. And it wasn't like the bill quadrupled. We eventually agreed to just split it down the middle after much (unnecessary) debate. About 6 months later, she bought herself a computer and our bills were still about the same.

I live on my own now.

When I lived with roommates, we split the bills but one roommate would pay a little extra on the water bill because she would take 2-4 showers/baths a day. (Kind of weird, I know.) The rest we split equally. And we all bought our own food because we were on different schedules and never ate together. We just labeled it and it was never really a problem.

My first instinct was to say that if you did not arrange something before hand then you are out of luck. However, after reading what other people have wrote my opinion changed. I think first of all the two of you need to sit down and make an arrangement for the future to avoid this again. Also, sometimes in winter the power company raises the cost of electricity. So, in your situation I would do this"
Compair the cost of electricity and make sure that the price did not go up.
then see what the average is for the same time last year ( i am assuming you two lived together last year) compare it with the bill from this year
i would sit down and talk to her about what happened. I do agree that you should not have to pay for electricity that you have not used. but because you have not made arrangements before hand she probably not going to agree very easily.
at the very least I think that she should pay the extra cost, say f take the average of last month and then she pay anything over as others have suggested.

I lived with people before and the womens son and grandson came to live with us for a while. I thought great cause we are splitting utlilties by 2 more people, however, the women bought a kiddy pool the the grandson and would empty it and fill it on a regular basis. I was soo pissed, but i really did not want to fight it and just ended up paying the extra money cause it was not worth the effort. This might be something that you need to think about. How much effort are you going to put into this and how much is the cost really going to effect your pocketbook

good luck

I'm in the process of evicting my second roommate for nonpayment of utilities, and we were having this same problem. Let's call this problem roommate Cuckoo.

Each bedroom, the living room/dining area and both bathrooms have heaters that are essentially space heaters in the wall, and in the ceiling of the bathroom. All of the power is electric, and we have a washer and dryer in our apartment. The heater in my room was broken, and I have the largest room (more area to heat, and two exterior walls that catch all the wind and snow drift, but I'm awesome and agreed to pay more in rent), so I added an extra blanket to my bed, and made sure to keep both sets of curtains closed. Other roommate realized that it was colder, covered her window, added an extra blanket, and only turned the heat on when she was in her room. However Cuckoo complained it was cold ALL the time, and made no effort to cover the window (Cuckoo never put up their curtains) or to add on another blanket (which was stored in the linen closet). I made "draft dodgers" for the two doors, and made some temporary curtains for the patio door and adjoining full length window. Cuckoo would have the heater on in the bedroom, when not home, and if home, would run that one and the one in another room, in addition to leaving lights on, sometimes all night. Cuckoo would take at least two showers a day, each one being longer than the combined shower time of the other two roommates. The other roommate often would shower at the gym three times a week as she had work or class and just stayed on campus.

The bill came for the month of November, and it was over a third higher than the previous month. We agreed to pay it in equal shares, but that we need to be more diligent about electricity use (Cuckoo specifically but we all agreed to it). Also it was noted that not only I, but the other roommate would be out of town for two weeks at the same time leaving Cuckoo alone, and though we'd contribute to the elctricity for the fridge and basic heating to keep the pipes from freezing, if the bill was the same or higher, it would not be split equally. The bill was only $1.28 less than the previous month including two people being out of town and insulation efforts.

Consequently, Cuckoo never paid, and now combined with that and other reasons, we're evicting Cuckoo. My suggestion to you is to pay it now since there wasn't a prior arrangement in place, and contact your electric company for a free energy audit to find out what items use the most electricty. Then with that information, try and work out a system agreeable to all roommates about when people are out of town and individual usage, and if certain personal items use more electricity it can be addressed accordingly. However living by yourself isn't a bad idea either.

Not worth it. You have to live with these girls. Do you want the people you live with to be pissed at you all the time? If it's not too much money (what are we talking, $50?) just bite the bullet and pay.

Of course, if you feel it's worth the drama, go ahead with that by all means.