Light bills naturally increase from June to December and decrease from December to June. They will be larger in a stormy month than in a bright one, and in an apartment with dark rooms than in one without. Water bills will be larger if the washing is done in the house than if it is not. Both light and water bills will be somewhat larger if the number of people in the household is increased. These things and any other household changes must be considered in accounting for variations in light and water bills. The cost of both these commodities can usually be kept within bounds by avoiding waste, such as burning a reading light by which no one is reading, or five lights in the ceiling, two of which would not be missed, or neglecting to turn off range burners until five or ten minutes after the cooking is finished, or leaving faucets half turned on, or running the tub and basin over every time they are used. Sometimes a reasonable carefulness in such things saves the necessity of stricter economy. The man who comes to read your gas, water or electric metres will usually be willing to teach you how to read them, if you ask as if you wanted information and not as if you wanted to catch him in a mistake. I might say here that plumbers, carpenters and furnace men if approached in the same way often prove very instructive. They are human, and can rarely resist the treat of giving information when the chance is offered to them. One can learn a great quantity of useful mechanics from them, besides things about their wives and children, both amusing and edifying. These are pictures of a gas-metre at the beginning and end of a month. [Illustration] The hands on the dials move in the directions the arrows indicate. Read the number last passed by the hand on each dial, beginning with the one farthest to the left and add two ciphers. _x_ reads 57600; _y_ reads 63800. The difference is the amount of gas used in the month. If you cannot take the two ciphers on faith, there is another way of reading the metre. Observe the words over each dial. Dial _c_ is in the hundreds moving toward "1 thousand," it therefore reads 600. Dial _b_ is in the thousands moving toward "10 thousand," and therefore reads 7000. Dial _a_ is in the ten thousands moving toward "100 thousand," and therefore reads 50,000. Together they amount to 57,600, the number obtained by the other method. This is the picture of an electric metre: [Illustration] To read the metre: Each hand moves in the direction indicated by the arrows. Read the figure that the hand has actually passed, beginning with the dial to the left. 755 K. W.'s Subtract last month's reading from this reading and the difference will be the amount consumed. Viz: 755 726 ---- 29 K. W.'s. The dials here are a simpler arrangement, as they merely represent the usual numeration--units, tens, hundreds, thousands.