Landlord pays for heat

[Doreen Hall]

Hi,

I am looking at a 3 family property where the landlord pays the heat. Each of the 3 apartments have their own thermostats. I wanted to ask if anyone knows of a way to monitor or put a limit the heat usage. Is it easy to submeter from one heating unit to 3 apartments?   

[Pat L.]

Originally posted by @Account Closed:

Just curious, have you been able to charge above market rents to compensate for heating? Do the tenants understand their total out of pocket is probably less even if rent is higher?

If you did decide to just include the heat and compensate for the rent...you can get special thermostats that have a limited range so they can't cook the place. Also I would include some sort of wording in the lease about not being wasteful, like opening windows and cranking the heat.

Our rents are well above mkt but we're in high demand, semi-rural, safe & peaceful & never had a vacancy. My daughter has no problem maxing out rents if we have someone moving out. 

Each unit has a basic thermostat that triggers the solenoid to allow the hot water through the lines. I did replace ALL the ancient dust coated hydronic baseboard heaters with new ones (got them 1/2 price). I ran all new Pex lines & removed a lot of superfluous piping I then added air vents to eliminate air locks. 

I did find some heat switching activated blower units on-sale ($63) & put them in a couple of very cold rooms. One was a kick space blower that I added to a rehabbed kitchen of a 2 bedroom unit. They tell me if on 'boost' it can raise the temp to 80 deg in no time so they keep their thermostat low. 

The 3rd floor rarely has theirs on as the heat below suffices. The ground floor units sit above the basement boiler so the floors are always warm & the basement is very dry & no risk of freezing pipes.

Adding 'wording in the lease' is NOT going to make a difference, but so far ours have all been great tenants.