There’s an urban myth, perpetuated not just through years but across generations, that New York City’s water is free. It’s understandable: as detailed in Diane Galusha’s book Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System, the web of upstate reservoirs supplying the city’s water – over a billion gallons a day – is largely delivered through gravity. Still, it’s time to dispel the myth: homeowners pay water bills. Or at least they’re supposed to. According to an expose in The New York Times in December 2006, millions of dollars in water bills go unpaid annually, the by-product of a colossally ineffective revenue-collection system. Now, with renewed attention being paid to this untapped (ahem) source of revenue, get ready for city government to crack down. Renters, rest easy: your water-bill share is almost certainly built into your monthly rent. But homeowners, if you’re not paying and the local government gets its act together, you might need to pay up.

The body that oversees this is the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (www.nyc.gov/html/dep), which thankfully does a great job otherwise in protecting and servicing the city’s precious water supply.

In addition to water, you’ll need electricity. The Consolidated Edison Company of New York, a regulated utility known as ConEd (www.coned.com), provides it. While the company’s antecedents go back some 180 years, today it brings electricity – partly through 91,000 miles of underground cables and another 35,000 miles of overheard wires – to all five boroughs (minus a sliver of Queens) and most of Westchester County, which is just north of the Bronx. ConEd also delivers natural gas to Manhattan, the Bronx and much of Queens and Westchester, and it also oversees what it calls the world’s largest steam system, all of which services Manhattan.