Submetering Success Stories

Submetering significantly benefits property managers and owners, from reducing costs to promoting conservation. But what does this look like in practice? Let’s take a look at some real-life examples.

The first story comes from AW Services Group, a submetering and utility billing service out of Boca Raton, Florida, who worked with a property manager to find the root cause of what they called “insanely high city water bills”. Using their submeters on site of the retail properties, they were able to discover the cause and the simple solution.

“After an internal expense audit flagged unusually high municipal water bills, an astute property manager asks AW Services Group, who provides water submetering and tenant utility billing services, to assist in diagnosing an extraordinary discrepancy between water usage reported by installed water submeters and city reported usage.

In February of 2024, AW Services Group, was contacted by the property management of Barshop & Oles Company in Austin, Texas to help identify some discrepancies between city water bills and usage reported by the water submetering system installed at their retail property.

After auditing their expenses at the Bar W Marketplace retail property, management questioned why the city was showing usage and billing for more than $18,000 for building E when water submetering is only reporting $1648 of usage – more than 10x the amount of water that the water submeters are reporting. 

AW Services billing team requested the city water bills for the Bar W and Bar W Phase II retail property to perform a same-cycle water/sewer analysis comparing city reported usage vs. water submetered reported usage.

A detailed review confirmed the city was billing for ten times more usage than reported by water submeters installed by AW Services for building E, and the investigation to identify the root cause continued. Property management monitored the situation after exhausting every possible step on their side by checking every tenant space and vacancy for leaks and installing submeters for each tenant.

Once property management shared a picture of the master water meter, the issue was plain to see. The city had been misreading this meter by ignoring a decimal point, so all reads are 10x the actual usage.

Taking this new finding into account, a complete analysis of the city municipal water bills, correcting for the meter read error, showed that the city has cumulatively overbilled Bar W properties by more than $40,000. (Case Study: Water Submetering and Utility Billing Identify Root Cause of City Overbilling, 2024)”

Our second example comes from New York City, where electric submetering was installed into an older building and is currently working to save the tenants money on their power bills.

“We recently worked with a pre-war building of about 130 units where the maintenance for each apartment included a charge for electricity. These charges were based on the number of shares owned. What that meant was that the people who used less electricity were subsidizing the people who used more electricity, so there were some obvious winners and losers. The board hired us to implement submetering, which is when you electrically meter every resident’s individual electricity usage. 

One of the benefits of submetering is that the board can remove the electric charges from the buildings operating budget, and thus reduce maintenance. When an owner sells his or her unit, maintenance will now be more comparable to buildings where units are directly metered, and not arbitrarily higher. Additionally, when owners start to see accurate electric bills, they start to think twice about how much they are paying. Generally speaking, we find that residents reduce their electrical usage anywhere from 20 to 25 percent as a result of a submeter conversion. 

[…] 

Once we got PSC approval, we could begin installation. For in-unit jobs, the meters are typically installed directly above or below the circuit breaker panel in each apartment. But in some apartments this was not possible because of cabinet placements or other renovations, so we sat down with the board and building staff to come up with a plan. The building ended up providing some extra labor so we could do the installation, and if a resident needed even more accommodation, it was provided at an additional cost to the owner. 

[…] 

Once the meters were installed, the board began fielding questions from residents. “What does this all mean? What is a kilowatt/hour, and what is a kilowatt? How is the bill calculated? How do I read this bill? How do I read my meter?” We scheduled several educational sessions to answer these questions, and we also explained what kind of things affected electrical consumption. We went over the items that were easy to change, like switching from incandescent to LED bulbs – as well as the more costly upgrades that would save electricity. 

Generally, installations like this are pretty standard, but in this building, it would have been better to spend more time doing a pre-installation walk-through to identify the additional requirements. This isn’t a brand-new technology, but it would have made things smoother if the installation conditions were better mapped out. That said, the project is complete, and all the meters are working and being read. This is definitely a success story. (Morrisson, 2019)”

As seen by our two examples, submetering as a tool has the power to save tenants and property owners money, as well as build on eco-friendly habits such as lower energy usage by making people more aware of the electricity they are using. Installation may seem like a hassle and not worth the upfront cost, but the long-term benefits far outweigh any initial frustrations.

References

Case Study: Water Submetering and Utility Billing Identify Root Cause of City Overbilling. (2024, August 14). Retrieved from awservicesgroup.com: https://www.awservicesgroup.com/utility-submetering-success-stories/case-study-water-submetering-and-utility-billing-identify-root-cause-of-city-overbilling/

Morrisson, T. (2019, July 30). An Electricity Submetering Success Story. Retrieved from habitatmag.com: https://www.habitatmag.com/Publication-Content/Green-Ideas/2019/2019-July/Submetering-Success