Cohousing-L Mailing List: How does your community divide up water bills?

[Ken Winter (ken]

Our cohousing community (like probably many others) gets a single bill from
the utility for all of its water usage.  There are no water meters on
individual units.

That leaves us (and probably many others) with the question of how to
divide the community water bill among our 40 households.  I'm writing to
find out how other coho communities deal with this issue.

Let me offer what we've learned so far about this issue.

One thing is that it's an issue for all collectively-metered multi-tenant
properties - condo associations, apartment buildings, etc - and so a whole
industry has sprung up to deal with it.  So have with state laws about what
schemes are acceptable.

So far, here is what we have learned about four general schemes:

*1. Divide the bill equally among all the units*.  This is what we have
doing for our first 20 years.  It's a simple scheme to administer.  But the
feeling has been growing that it is unfair for a single-person household to
pay as much for its water as a five-person household.

*2. Direct-billing of each unit by the water utility.*  This involves
installing unit meters that the utility can read.  This scheme obviously
gives the fairest bills and  is out of the question for us because of the
huge costs of the retrofit re-plumbing*, *plus our local utility refuses to
bill condo units separately.

*3. Pro-rate the bill by some criteria *that are believed to be a better
estimate of actual usage by each household.  The criteria we've flirted
with are the number of residents in each unit, or the number of adult
residents.  Other formulas use other criteria such as square footage,
number of beds, etc.  In the biz, this approach is called Ratio Utility
Billing Systems (RUBS).  Going down this path has left us with three
as-yet-unresolved issues:  (1) Accuracy:  What criteria do give the best,
or at least a good-enough, approximation to actual usage.  Opinions on this
point abound, and data are almost non-existent. (2) Administrative
complexity:  For each billing period, you have to measure each household on
each criterion you're using.  E.g. with a per-resident formula, you have to
count how many residents each household had in the period, and deal with
cases like people who weren't actually there for some of the period.  (3)
Values:  Do our community values call for some households (e.g. childless
ones) to subsidize the water bills of others (e.g. households with kids)?

*4. Sub-metering*.  Install a meter in each unit, and apportion the
community's total bill into unit bills based on each unit's actual usage.
This eliminates the accuracy issue.  Technology is now available whereby
the meter readings are automatically transmitted to a central device, which
in turn sends them to a database on the internet.  The community billing
person or system downloads the data from the internet and turns them into
per-unit bills.  So the administrative complications of in-person
meter-reading and most of the manual bookkeeping are eliminated.
Sub-metering does, however, introduce potential costs and headaches because
of the complicated new system that you have to maintain.  And some people
are concerned about the perceived health effects of adding yet another
source of radio waves (the same general kind that you get from cell phones,
wi-fis, and smart meters) into the community environment.  The research
I've found confirms that sub-metering also provides a conservation bonus:
When people can see (and know that they're gonna pay for) their own water
usage, their usage drops by 15% or more.  And it makes it easier to
determine the location of leaks that are driving up the community's water
bill.  A rough estimate from one vendor indicates that we could have it
installed and operating for a one-time cost of $200-$300 per unit.

As you can no doubt sense, right now we're quite smitten with the idea of
sub-metering.  But we only discovered this option a week ago, and our
research is just getting underway.

So, as part of that research, we'd like to pose these questions:

1. Do you have any experience with or information about sub-metering?

2. How does your community divide up its water bills?  How's that working
for you?

3. Any other ideas or suggestions on this topic?

We'll feed back to this list anything else we learn or decide, in case it
will be useful to your community too.

~ Thanks in advance!

~ Ken Winter, Sunward Cohousing, Ann Arbor MI