One PAYG Electric Meter, Multiple Houses

Overlord_X

Hi MSE forumgoers,

I have recently moved into a property and it wasn't until I had moved in that it was brought to my attention that the meter is shared between several properties, where the obvious main property is the house I have moved into (if you saw it you'd understand).

The issue I have is that with this shared meter how legal is that and how are you meant to budget your electricity appropriately? Right now it appears as though our house is using about £6 a day which seems pretty high, all things considered, as at the previous property we weren't using anywhere near that much. We do have some extraneous electrical equipment that will add a chunk of change on top of the weekly bill but it's about 800W worth of gear and by my calculations, at most, it should add £20 a week on top of the bill and that's the theoretical maximum if the gear's on 24 hours a day, which I know for a fact it isn't.

I'm just curious about how legal it is to serve several houses with a single electric meter though and whether or not I should be demanding my landlord get it sorted out?

Regards,

O_X

molerat

Perfectly "legal". Something you need to sort out with your LL, how do the other properties pay for their use ?

Overlord_X

molerat wrote: »

Perfectly "legal". Something you need to sort out with your LL, how do the other properties pay for their use ?

Well basically there's a meter in the other house that measures usage and then the idea is that you pay according to your usage but the issue is the garage that runs off the same electricity supply is direct from the supply I believe which is not part of our property so it's not being recorded through the meter. Furthermore I don't even know what the tariff rate for the electricity we're paying for is. Also looking at it, I don't think the supply to the other house was installed professionally (it appears to be buried under concrete going under the driveway to the other house, I suspect it should be buried deeper and possibly in conduit).

Is it too much to ask for a second meter to be installed? I would rather have control over who my supplier is than having to share that with a fellow tennant. It also begs the question of what happens if the other tennant decides to not pay for electricity, that would mean I would have to either pay up or put up with no electricity until the dispute was sorted which I cannot afford to happen.

Overlord_X

£6 spent across the last 24 hours (the other tennants are on holiday) so that works out as £2,200 a year which seems abnormally high or am I missing something?

Alter_ego

Other tenants may have left Freezers/fridges who knows what switched on.

AndyCF

I would concur the first step is to speak to the LL to see what joy (or not) you get, at least their views on it all if you explain your concerns.

I don't know about the cable issue you mentioned although from your description it does sound a bit of a concern.

I do know (and I am aware the regs have no doubt changed a bit!) about 15 years ago I looked into running a length of cable from the house to the shed, approx 6 metres and was told "legally" it should be armoured cable but that is obviously sensible and must be buried so many feet depth, very old an inaccurate information no doubt but I read your post on this as though its just simply buried a little bit under the driveway area. I'm sure we have fully qualified electrical people "in the know" who will be able to say what the requirements are for this, I expect it might vary if its a 'mains feed' cable or some kind of 'internal extension' type.