Electricity in a PG: sub-meters, splitting, and the argument you keep having
Every PG has this conversation. Somebody runs an air conditioner through the afternoon, somebody else charges a phone and reads, and at the end of the month both of them pay the same fixed amount for power.
The careful resident is subsidising the other one, knows it, and eventually says so. Usually to the person paying, not to you — which is how a solved-looking house acquires a reputation.
Why the flat charge is so popular anyway
It is not laziness. A flat power charge has real advantages: it is one number in the rent, nobody has to read anything, and there is no monthly arithmetic. For a small house where everybody uses roughly the same amount, it is genuinely fine.
It stops being fine at exactly the point air conditioning enters the building. From then on, the spread between the lightest and heaviest user is larger than any flat number can be fair to. Set the charge low and you fund the heavy user; set it high and the light user is paying for a machine they never switch on.
Both of those cost you the same thing: a resident who leaves at the end of their notice for reasons they never quite explain.
What a sub-meter actually changes
A sub-meter per room does not primarily save money. It changes what kind of conversation you are having.
Without one, "your electricity is high this month" is an opinion, and the reply is an opinion too. With one, it is a reading. The conversation moves from whose behaviour is reasonable to what the number is — and that is a conversation that ends.
Two practical notes from houses that have done it:
- Meter the room, not the bed. Individual beds cannot be metered without rewiring the room, and roommates share the lights and the fan anyway. The room is the unit the physical wiring already gives you.
- Note the reading on the same day every month. A reading taken on the 3rd one month and the 27th the next produces a bill that looks wrong, because it is measuring a different length of month.
The two defensible ways to split one meter
Once you have a room's consumption for a month, you have to divide it among the people who lived there. There are two methods that survive being questioned.
Equal split. Everybody in the room pays the same share.
share per resident = room consumption / residents in the room
Simple, and correct when everybody was there for the whole month.
Split by days stayed. Everybody pays for the days they were actually in the room.
share = room consumption
x (days that resident stayed / total resident-days in the room)
This is the one that matters, because PG rooms do not fill and empty on the first of the month. A resident who moved in on the 22nd and is billed an equal third of a month's power will tell everybody they meet that you overcharged them, and they will be right.
Anything more elaborate than these two — apportioning by appliance, charging AC rooms a premium on top of a meter reading — needs to be agreed in writing before the month starts, or it reads as a number invented after the fact.
The markup question
Some owners bill power at more than they were charged for it, treating the gap as a service fee.
Be careful here. Electricity supply is a regulated business in every state, several regulators have taken a dim view of charging occupants above the tariff the supplier billed, and a resident who works out that they are paying more per unit than the utility charges has a complaint they can take somewhere other than to you.
The safe position, and the one that produces no arguments: pass through at the rate you were billed, and show the reading. If you need to recover the cost of the meters, the wiring or your time, put it in the rent where it is visible and agreed, rather than hiding it in a per-unit rate somebody can check against their own bill.
This is orientation, not advice. Electricity rules are state rules and they differ. If you plan to charge anything other than a straight pass-through, ask somebody who knows your state's position before you do.
What to actually put in front of the resident
A power bill a resident cannot check is a power bill a resident will dispute. Four things make it checkable:
- The previous reading and the current reading.
- The units consumed — the subtraction, shown.
- The rate, and where it comes from.
- How their share was worked out, if the room is shared.
That is four lines. Houses that print those four lines stop having this argument almost entirely, because there is nothing left to have it about.
How HamaraPG handles it
Meters are recorded against the property, readings are entered as you take them, and the bill for a period splits across the residents behind that meter — equally, or by the days each of them actually stayed, which is the case that ordinarily goes wrong. The split lands on each resident's bill rather than in a separate notebook, so what they owe for power sits next to what they owe for rent.
The readings themselves are guarded in the ways that matter: a new reading lower than the previous one is refused rather than silently producing a negative bill, readings have to be entered in order, and a reading that has already been billed can no longer be edited underneath the bill it produced.
That is on the Standard plan, alongside the rate cards and the expense ledger — see the features page for what sits where.
Related reading: what a PG actually earns, where utilities are one of the lines in cost per bed, and getting the rent in.