Introduction
Utilities (Power, Gas, and Water) are basic necessities one must have in our day to day living. Just like the rules of governing building varies from place to place so also the rules set by utility companies like Power, Water or Gas Distribution Companies also varies.
To enable these utilities, provide their services they must be able to meter the volume of utility they have supplied to us. It could be in kilowatts Hour (kWh) for electricity, cubic meter per seconds/liters for second for Water or cubic meters for Gas. The most important and common term across all these utilities are meters.
The Distribution company and/or supplier may choose to meter you Postpaid, meaning you first use, and a bill is sent later or Prepaid, you must have paid before service is consumed. Unfortunately, utilities are running away from Postpaid billing methods and focusing more on the prepaid method because postpaid encourages customers to become debtors.
If you read this and this, you will see Disco Nigeria are unable to pay their bills to Generation Companies largely because of unmetered or postpaid metering issues. Consequently, they are looking for innovative ways to reduce customers debt in the present and in the future.
To properly understand, the need for sub-metering, let’s considers an electricity billing system as a utility example.
Once a property has about 10 occupants or more or difficult to access areas in the compound, Disco sees these as a potential debt trap, illegal connection haven and multiple bypass cases. To prevent these isseus form occurring they enforce the property owner to get a Maximum Demand (MD) Meter and in some cases, they are also required to get a transformer.
After installtion, they have meter the transformer or main service wire at source, with this sorted Discos have limited worry over revenue loss. However, once they meter at the power source, what happens to the individual customers in the property?
Essentially, this brings about the term – Submetering.
What then is Submetering or subsidiary meter?
It is a meter that enables the property owners, landlord, and facility manager to monitor the electricity, gas or water consumed independently by a single customer. They are not sold by the Disco but approved for sale by the relevant regulatory agencies.
Each area to be measured must have its own sub-meter, and it is fitted to measure what was consumed by each individual consumer.
Submetering can be used in multiple scenarios like: markets, backyard rentals, estates, shopping complexes, Disco franchisees, boys quarters flats, student accommodation, vacation rentals, business parks, apartment blocks, complexes, shops in hotels and filling stations.
How it work?
The MD meter from the DISCO, records the total utility consumed for the entire property, while the sub-meter only records a portion of the consumption. Ideally in the individual sub-metered consumer.
This means that total sum of consummation in all the sub-meters but be less than or equal to the bill from the Disco based on the MD meter’s reading.
The MD meters can be postpaid or prepaid, but majority of the installed MDs are postpaid. The Discos comes once at the end of each month to measure what was consumed and send a bill a week later.
Present Problem
Must landlord charge residents with an estimated billing, this method is prone to:
errors, over or under billing and unfair advantage to some residents.
Our Solution
Even though Prepaid deemed the best option in billing, we still seat with the property owners/managers to agree on the most desired method of billing.
How we go about it
- Install and configure Sub meters for each resident/tenant.
- Integrate payment and SMS gateway to enable tenants to buy power on their own and money is sent to the landlord/facility managers’ account directly.
- Provide Oliver self-service power vending solution.
Our power vending solution is very intuitive and simple to use, see more:
Benefits of prepaid/postpaid sub-metering in properties?
It has been confirmed that property owners/managers enjoy a lot of benefits for using submeters and have been a tool that helps solve a love of challenges, some of obvious benefits in a few days of installation include:
- Allowing for reliable and accurate utility management for commercial and residential properties.
- Minimizing admin workloads.
- Improving transparency, customer engagement and saves you money.
- Property owners/managers receive payments for their utilities upfront in prepaid scenarios and promotes revenue assurance.
- Reduce the possibility of energy theft.
- Eliminate manual collection of revenue/payments for power.
- Easily increase and reduce the energy tariff price.
- Can be deployed in dual power source or dual tariff scenarios to support diesel generator bill.
To get started with your submetering solution:
reach out via e-mail: hello@hacomenergy.com or WhatsApp/Call to: +2347014207004