Re: How does your community divide up water bills?
From: R Philip Dowds (rpdowdscomcast.net)
Date: Sun, 21 May 2017 06:41:15 -0700 (PDT)
At Cornerstone, we divide up the unitary water/sewer bill according to the 
number of residents in the unit, not the size of the units.  Plumbing 
engineers, however, divide up distribution according to fixture type and count. 
 We think the former is close enough, and the latter is too complicated.  My 
suggestion is: Do not obsess about getting it perfect.  Any formula you choose 
is just an approximation, and any margin of error is not likely to result in 
more than a few dollars per household per month, one way or the other.

Thanks,
Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Village Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

> On May 20, 2017, at 4:31 PM, Ken Winter <ken [at] sunward.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
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