Garment Street Condos | 25 & 6 fl | Complete

[ijmorlan]

The utility would be fine with having many individual pipes metered more or less at the property line (or maybe where the many pipes enter the building). But as pointed out, that’s a lot of extra piping. My idea is to pipe it more or less as it is now, but put the meters where each unit’s pipe enters the unit. The problem is that the utility would be legitimately concerned about leaks between where the pipe enters the building and where the meters are at each unit. They don’t want to be in charge of maintaining that part of the piping.

Right now, individual condos can pay one bill to the water utility and then charge back to their unit owners by maintained their own meters, but that is a lot of overhead; in effect they would act as a small water company with a lot of billing overhead.

My solution is for the real water utility to meter both the entrance to the building and the entrances to the individual units. Bill the units as normal for houses, and bill the condo itself only for the difference between the building meter and the total of the individual unit meters. This difference could either be water used by the condo itself (e.g. a fountain, or a sink in a common area), but a better idea would be to meter all uses of the water so the overall bill in principle should come out to zero. This would allow easy detection of leaks: just look for a significant water bill to the building itself.

Nowadays meters have remote reporting devices installed, so this would not require a meter reader to enter the building. I believe it’s actually automatic now, and able to be considerably more frequent than monthly thanks to the automation.