Cost of Living In Seychelles – Utilities

I get a lot of questions about the cost of living in Seychelles, so it is about time I wrote a post about it.

I’m not going to lie, I have attempted to cover this in the past. Cost of living is such a massively variable thing, I’ve never been quite sure how to tackle it.

To stop this from being an absolute monster of a blog post I’m going to break it up a little bit.  Today I’m covering utilities; Electricity, Water and Gas. I have also written a post on the costs of food.  I’ll cover other expenditures in a future posts

Cost of Utilities in Seychelles

Water, Sewerage and Electricity is provided by PUC (Public Utilities Corporation).  A few people have their own water source but the vast majority of people get their water direct from PUC.

Meter readings are taking monthly by PUC at your property and your bill is given to you directly.

I’ll give a little more info about each here and a rough approximation of what we pay a month.

Electricity

To give you a rough idea, we pay approximately 1000scr a month for our electricity. It’s by no means a fixed amount and as I mentioned it’s based entirely on your meter reading.

We have air conditioning in only one of our bedrooms and we use it very rarely. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Air Con will probably be the biggest factor in electricity usage. I’m not saying to not use it, by any means it’s just something to bare in mind! In our previous house we had air conditioning in all three of our bedrooms and we would often put them on for maybe half hour or so before bed to cool down the room. This never seemed to make a huge difference in our bills, but obviously having the air conditioning blasting all night would do.

If you want to get a bit more information on the rates, you can look at PUC’s Electricity Tariffs.

Someone has asked me about having a generator, I don’t know anyone who has a generator for their home. Some businesses have them, but not all. Power cuts are not completely uncommon here, there are definitely far fewer now than when we first moved here. Typically they last less than an hour, but occasionally there are planned power cuts for maintenance work which last half a day or so.

Water

Our water bills come out around 300-400scr a month, again purely based on meter readings.

Check out PUC water rates for the break down on their charges.

Most houses these days have a big water tank. At certain times of the year there can be large periods of the day where water is shut off, due to drought. If your house has a water tank you will almost certainly never notice that the water goes off (apart from perhaps a slight change in pressure). When the water comes back on, the tank fills back up, so this doesn’t have an impact on your water bill.

We don’t drink our tap water, we get this delivered in big bottles and use a water cooler. (see my post on things to buy to make expat life in seychelles easier for more on this) I reckon we spend about 250-300scr a month on water.

Gas

All gas comes in bottles, i.e it is not mains fitted. This makes measuring the cost a little harder in that obviously it depends what you use it for. In our current house our gas is just for our oven, inside as well as the hob. But in a previous house we had a separate gas bottle to heat our water so it really does all depend.  We typically keep a spare in the house in case one runs out half way through cooking.  You pick up the gas bottles from the petrol stations and they cost about 200scr for a 12kg bottle which will last a good few months.

I hope that you’ve found this useful.  In general we have always found our utility bills to be a lot lower than they were when we were living in the UK.  Obviously some months they are higher than others, as is the case everywhere!  I like that they are always done by the meter so we can tell exactly what we have used each month.  Keep an eye out for some more posts soon about the cost of living in Seychelles!