How Heat Metering May Help You Lower Your Gas Bill

Winter is here! With it, often times you will find that your gas bill will skyrocket. To put some control into it, you could put a meter system into your property’s heating system to monitor its use. It shows that when a multi-tenant complex has heat meter which is used to bill residents for their portion of gas, the bill most of them time will decrease, sometimes even by 35%.

Some managers and property owners might not be aware that each heating system such as fan coil, furnace, water heater, et cetera, could be metered affordably to determine each tenant’s level of use.

Heat metering could be useful for the tenants of the property because they only need to pay what they use. It allows the usage of the gas bill to be tracked to each user, so each usage is fairly billed to each user correctly. Also, because of heat metering people will tend to use the heat conservatively to avoid huge bill. Another worthy mention is when there is heat metering, residents often see a decrease in the usage of other utilities, because heat metering simply allow them to be more energy-conscious. Another benefit of gas metering is the rate is going to be at a reduced rate because commercial rate will be applied to master-metered complex.

It is not costly to install such metering into your complex. You can anticipate spending around $195-$250 per each unit to install a wireless metering system that would take care all of the billing for you as well. However, if a unit has a domestic hot water heater and a furnace, expect to spend about $390-$500 per unit since each unit would need two meters.

The installation is pretty quick; it should not take a technician more than 30 minutes to install the meter. To fully install a 100-unit condo or apartment, you can expect to take about less than a week for two technicians to work on them.

In almost every state, it is legal to install heat metering in an apartment or condominium complex. However, you should confirm with the authority whether that is the case in your state, county and city. It is also important to include a disclosure on the that says that the property owner has the right to bill for utilities, and any tenants should sign the agreement in advance.

In short, heat metering is an affordable tool to help conserve energy in general and to bill utility cost to your tenants in a fair way.