Utility Bills Management

Depending on the resource in question and the utility provider, bills tend to arrive on either a monthly or quarterly basis. With very few exceptions in Residential or commercial real estate, bills arrive for the entire building and it’s up to the property manager to recover the cost from their tenants. Reading your bill, the most important number is obviously the total cost. For most resources – water, gas, and steam – this is based on simple volume. For electricity, things get a bit more complicated. For those bills, the next most important numbers are peak load and total consumption, both of which are measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Total consumption is an intuitive measure – it’s simply the total amount of electricity consumed during the billing period. The only important distinction is that the time when energy was consumed may affect the cost per kWh. During peak hours – often in the afternoon during the summer and the morning and evening during the winter – electricity is in high demand. Electricity companies charge more during these hours to encourage customers to shift their consumption patterns. Conversely, electricity is often discounted during the low demand hours overnight. Peak load is less intuitive. Electricity isn’t like water; you can’t store it in a tank when you aren’t using it, you have to generate it and use it at the same time. (There are ways of storing energy, but they’re slow, inefficient, and expensive.) This is important because, when you look at a graph of your building’s energy use over the course of a day, you’re likely to find small “spikes.” During these periods, your energy use was much higher than the average, but perhaps only for a few minutes. That spike may have not consumed many kWh, but it required a large current (kW) from the grid.
The utility companies have a clear motive to cut down on consumption spikes. A steadier demand means that electricity companies can better plan their operations, but a spikier one – more often if spikes come around the same time – may mean that peaking power plants have to be flipped on, which costs more money. They discourage spikes with peak load charges. In addition the cost per kWh, customers are also charged for the highest level of current that they drew during the billing period. Depending on your state and a few other factors, bills may also come with a few other, generally small fees. These cover things like the cost of administration or maintaining infrastructure. We as a company management all the utility bills related issues of our customers which comes as a part of our Property management services for all kothis, Plots, Apartments, flats and commercial shops.