High Energy Bill For Tenants

[Chris G.]

So the shared living units we manage  mainly for students they are 4 bed 4 bath 1200 sqft. We include $200 of utility charges a month. Anything over is split among the tenants. Lately with electric costs rising we’ve been charging tenants an extra $25-50 a month it seems. But we have one unit that out of no where we get September bill it’s $900 (avg is $180-300 for us). Pretty much 700 out of 900 is electric cost using 4300 kwh which is extremely high. Contacted the owner and he wants this charged to the tenants like normal, it would be impossible pretty much for the tenants to use this much power, looking back at the last 12 months of electric bills it has been 1000-1300 kwh per month and now 3-4 times higher. I feel there is either a utility company issue or a major electrical issue and don’t think that should fall on the tenants, looking for opinions on this. I know the owner doesn’t want to have to pay that alone but still these tenants are grad students I know their smart enough to figure out using that much electric in a month for that size unit would be impossible and will refuse to pay.