Need Help. Paying For Heat/Elec. Tenants Using Space Heaters!

[William Coet]

Hello,

I would like to know if there are solutions to this problem:

Despite the thermostat being set to 68-70 degrees, the tenants will plug in electric space heaters and drive up the electric costs.

This is a 4 unit building and it would be very costly to add additional electric panels and meters.

Thanks!

[Tom Malloy]

You can get a meter installed that will measure electrical usage for an individual unit. A good brand is E-mon D-mon. Get an electrician to install it and you can measure individual unit usage. (Need one for each unit) this will allow you to set a threshold for what you will pay for as the landlord and what will be charged back to the unit per KW hour. You will have to check the meters each month and assign additional charges based on the electrical pricing on your monthly bill. Additionally, in the future leases you could make the tenants responsible for their entire electric bill because you will have a way to measure exactly how much they spent each month. Reading the meters and billing the tenants takes only a couple hours but why not make it an added income source (or expense reduction) to the tune of 4x$150 per month?