Panama Utilities

Introduction – In the course of providing immigration services for many of our clients our law firm gets asked a lot of questions about the utilities in Panama so here are the answers to the most common questions.

Panama Phones – You can take an American telephone from the USA and plug it into the wall jack of a Panama house and get a dial tone instantly if there is phone service turned on. Same exact phones. Unlimited local calls within Panama City to other land lines are $29.95 per month. Land line calls to cell phones cost by the minute because the cell phone user is not charged for incoming calls in Panama. It is cheaper to call a cell phone from another cell phone. Land lines can be blocked from calling cell phones requiring a pass code to make the call. Panama maids have a habit of calling their friends and relatives on your land line phone and running up a nice bill for you. Remember land line calls to cell phone are costly. So seeing your maid run up $50.00 or more a month on your phone bill is far from uncommon. Watch out for this, block calls to cell phones and do not give the password to the maid.

Panama Cell Phones – Cell phone service in Panama is about as good as most of North America and Europe. It is at the very least acceptable. At lunchtime and at 5PM the circuits get busy and calls do not complete or get dropped. There are dead zones but not that many. In the country there are areas where a signal will be hard to get. Many people buy a prepaid cell phone. Nice ones are now $15.00 and you own it. You then buy minutes by purchasing a card from a street vendor. You rub off letters and enter a code into the phone and the minutes get activated. Minutes last 30 days so every month you need a card. Cards can be had for as little as $5.00 up to $20.00. The higher the dollar values of the card the lower the cost per minute of calls. Incoming calls are free to you. Prepaid phones get a lot of advertising messages as text. Do not check them since that will cost you. Rates vary and there is generally a three for one special on minutes but it is not as cheap as a contract phone. Deposits for a contract phone can be steep for a foreigner. Suggest you get a house phone for six months or a year and then apply. It is the same phone company and they will treat you way differently. You can get high end phones here just like anywhere else. Motorola Razor is popular. You can get web access, email etc. You can arrange to call internationally from your cell phone as well. The cell phones in Panama are not so great about working in other countries, but do work in some countries.

Panama Water Quality – You can drink the water in Panama City and most of the other developed cities but not everywhere in Panama so ask or use bottled water. The Americans were in Panama until 2000 so the water is fine. It tastes ok. Many people use bottled water and filters like they did in their mother country, old habits are hard to break.
Bottled water is very cheap and they deliver the jugs to you to insert in a dispenser that cools the water.

Panama Electricity – There are frequent little power outages in Panama. Almost all the apartment buildings have some sort of a generator to at least run the elevators. Some will actually let the air conditioners power up as well. Outages are usually minutes or a few hours, not days or anything like that. Electricity in Panama is priced by the zone so you will probably pay more for electricity than the home your maid came from, a lot more, and multiple times more. That being said even if you have 200 – 300 sq. meters and run the air conditioning you bill should be under $300 a month and if you hardly use the air conditioning it will be under $200. Most units do not have central air. They use window units installed in the cement walls or something called a split. A split has the blower unit in the house against a wall or on the ceiling and the compressor is located outside on a ledge to keep the noise down. Splits are usually more powerful and used in the larger rooms, but not always. Splits have a habit of operating by remote control with thermostats which in my opinion means the room is too hot or too cold unless you constantly manipulate the remote. At home your central unit had a thermostat in a central location, with a split the thermostat is on the unit so it does not give a representative temperature. I prefer a window type unit that is powerful with a manual high, medium low type dial so I can learn where to set it just right. Many people only use the air conditioning at night relying on the Panama breezes during the day. We are between two oceans you know. If the breeze dies at night you will then get hot and wake up thus the air conditioning. Some also go for ceiling fans and floor fans.

Panama Gas - Our hot water is generally heated by a gas heater. The unit is often in the kitchen and has a pilot light which will blow out if you keep the windows wide open <smile>. Since we are full tropical you can just use the water without the heater once you get a little used to it and it tends to cool you off. I would not suggest this in Toronto during January; I am not a polar bear or anything. The heater has a dial that you set depending on how hot you want the water. It takes maybe a minute for the water to start coming out hot. Generally the time delay applies to sinks also so most just wash hands with cold water. When you turn on the hot water it begins water flow through the hot water pipe. This get the heater to fire up and the water passes through the pipe which goes through the hot water heater, and you can see the flame burning in the heater and thus out flows hot water, very hot water if you want it. You never run out of hot water with this system. When you turn off the hot water the flame dies down to just the pilot light. Keep windows open in kitchen always at least a little in case pilot light goes out.

Panama Internet – As good as anywhere and at North American prices. Cable internet at 1 Meg speeds with a full assortment of cable TV with about 40 English stations is about $99.00 a month. In Panama City you will get cable TV main station from New York City. Be careful not to get alarmed when they air a blizzard alert late at night when you are half asleep, it is not for us <smile>. The cable does air not so soft, soft porn on regular stations. The more extreme stuff is on special pay stations. You can buy DVD recorder that record off the air to a hard drive. I understand the cable companies offer a TIVO type device as of recently for extra money. The cable also offers pay per view movies.

Panama Cable TV – Pretty much covered above with the Panama Internet.

Panama Satellite TV- They offer this as well. I used it once and when a storm passes which is frequent in rainy season the broadcast get brief outages. I did not like it.