Capping water expenses without having separate meters?

[Tim Nelson]

Hello all, I own a 4 unit apartment complex in Kansas where I pay all water and sewer. The units are not metered separately so the bill for the entire complex comes as one payment - to me. The cost is relatively low and I pay it with a smile on my face, however in Dec/Jan/Feb I had a running toilet that cost me $1500 in water bills, FAR more than usual. The tenant never let us know there was an issue and by the time I found out, I was on the hook for the payments. 

In my future leases I would like to cap the water expenses I pay at $200 per month. Anything over that will be distributed equally and charged to the tenants.  

Is this something I can legally do given the fact that I don't have the water metered separately? 

At this time, I don't want to pay to have them separately metered, but am open to it in the future. To be honest I'm not sure how much it would cost to have them separately metered, and I'm deployed right now, so managing projects is difficult. 

[Eli Molloy]

I don't know about splitting the bill but here is a thread about leak detectors and alarms from last week. One or a few of these could help alert you next time this is an issue. 

https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/412542-water-leak-detection-devices?page=1#p2587838