All Forum Posts by: Austin Tam

Shout out to @Austin Tam regarding the Cleveland water portal. Signed up and downloaded the recent 2 week period for my 39 unit MF property. What it showed was there was NO hourly period  with 0 usage which suggest a leak. Having said that, there are many periods with only 0.001 or 0.002 MCF (not surprisingly all in the early AM) which is 1 or 2 cubic feet. A toilet flush on a 1.6 G is 0.21 cubic ft so it would take ~5 flushes to run 1 cubic foot.

Assuming there is a leak of .001 cubic feet per hour, that works out to 8.736 MCF per year or ~$367 for the water + $782 for the sewer; total ~$1,100.

Going to discuss with my PM. If it is one find-able leak, well worth plugging but what if it is a bunch of smaller drips. Just the cost of isolating where they are may be a lot of $$$.

Oren

@Austin Tam What's your reason to believe these are toilet flushes? Unless you actually called your tenant to ask about their potty routines, you're making a pretty big assumption. 

The meter will "click" up 0.001 MCF every time 7.5 gallons has gone through. So where you see no usage at 10 and 11, they very well may have used the toilet or cleaned some dishes by hand, etc, but until the unit measures another 7.5 gallons total nothing more will register. 

In theory they could use one drop of water and trigger another 7.5 on the chart, or use 7.4 gallons and not trigger a reading at all. Make sense? 

It's a give and take in the RE game. I prefer to have LESS headaches and if it means I miss out on a few dollars BUT I'm not worrying about water, sewer, grass cutting, snow removal and constant turn over every year. I'll take less cash and keep my health and sanity

If you look at the hourly you just going to drive yourself crazy. 

Hence that's why I didn't know it existed. I buy SFR to pass on the bill to the tenant. Life is simple then

@Austin Tam - the way I interpret the "lowest unit of measurement" is that you'll get dinged for 7.5 gallons once that many gallons have been used- in other words, at that point, the meter "clicks" and another .001 MCF is added to your total. For a duplex, your usage is looking pretty normal. On Monday July 16th, one of your residents(the early bird) got up around 6 am, *might* have flushed the toilet, then took a 4 minute shower and was off to work. That one's industrious! 

Around 8-10 am, another two residents arose, you had a few toilet flushes and 12 mins combined of showering at approximately 2 gallons per minute which would tally the 30 gallons you see there, then those two took off to work.

Go to Home Depot and pick up four Niagara Stealth toilets(.8 gpf and much cheaper if you pick them up instead of having them shipped,) install some 1.75 gpm showerheads(make sure they're well-rated,) check to make sure your faucets have the proper aerators installed and that you have no leaks, and call me in the morning.

MG, PhD in Cheapness 

@Austin Tam, I am a mortgage banker for the last 13 years and have yet to find someone to do this in NY. I did shoot her an email and she did reply quickly and confirmed what I just said. They follow fannie and Freddie and what she is referring to is delayed financing. All lenders offer this. This is off of purchase price and not appraised value. Thanks again 

@Austin Tam, I just found a thread about this by your lender from a year ago. They follow Fannie and Freddie guidelines. 6 months to go off of the new appraised value like everyone else. Thanks anyway. 

So I don't know exactly how the meter determines a click over from .001 to .002 but in looking at a couple random days at one of my properties I'm noticing that this might be rounding error in their visualization software... when I add up hourly, I'm consistently getting a number higher than the the total presented back for daily... Might be worth asking them..

On the bills, I have 4 duplexes in Parma which use Cleveland water, typically the properties are occupied by 4-5 people total & the bills (Water & Sewer) run between 100-150 all in.  Given the other replies I'll consider my self lucky...  Note, I don't allow dishwashers, however washers are ok.