Well, this is a first!

So on SFR #3, we have been having an interesting situation occur.  As our plan to get everyone off our master power bill, something interesting came up.  We had a $300 bill for power in December and $600 in January.  This just occurred as it started to get cold (This is Mississippi after all).  The only thing that's supposed to be on the master power meter is a few lights and a couple of other smaller items.

We knew something had to be up.  We brought in an electrician to see if we could figure out why a few items cost us $600 when it should be less than $50.  What we discovered absolutely amazed us.  Turns out, even though every unit is individually metered, there were still random items on our master meter, including 2 heating/cooling units.  This was the main cause of the larger bill.  We had the electrician move everything to the appropriate units meter.  Unfortunately, this means that a couple of units are about to get hit with a $200+/month higher bill in the colder and hotter months than they were used to.  I'm sure they thought they had super efficient apartments.  We plan on reaching out to them and explaining the situation.  We aren't going to go back and ask for back utilities because of this but going forward, we will save $500/month in expenses.

I had no idea this could happen.  Obviously, anything is possible but whoever originally metered that apartment apparently had NO IDEA what they were doing.  It never occurred to us for a second that this was a possible scenario.  On our bigger complexes, checking this out is definitely on our to-do list when purchasing a property.  We probably lost thousands of dollars since we purchased because of this.