Have you visited lately the Pick n Pay or Checkers electrical section lately? As the winter starts arriving and later nights are getting cold, people start looking at heating solutions.
If you have a look at the heating products presented by some of the big retailers you may find that most of these, if not all of them, are electricity based. That would not be a problem in itself, but if you check the electricity consumption of some of these products, you may get a fright. Electrical heaters are very heavy on electricity.
This means that electricity bills are about to increase at the rate people are buying these products. For one, if you need heating products, you should check the electrical consumption of these products and try to find the most effective once in consumption.
That alone is not the only problem. Some landlords include the electricity price in their rentals. This often happens in mid and lower market. Example would be a rental of a small property for 3,500 including electricity and water. Taking into consideration that will electrical heaters the electricity bill per month could jump as much as 100 or even 300 rands more, these landlords are subsidizing a massive amount of money from the rental for such heaters. The geysers also start using more electrical power as the air gets cold and the thermostat gets the geyser working more often to keep the water at the temperature set on the geyser.
If one is including in the rental the electricity, the landlord can lose anywhere from 1000 to even 5,000 rands just during the winter period due to high electricity bills.
The tenants that have electricity included in the rental do not care to have reduced electricity consumption. Why should they? They are not paying for it.
Unfortunately this is a bad habit. It is interesting when you consider that when a tenant has to pay the electricity in prepaid mode they will look carefully at the consumption, however, when the electricity is provided for free (in other words included in the rental), the tenants have no consideration of their consumption.
I don't think even Eskom would be happy about this, due to the massive consumption demand they ca no longer keep up with.
Landlords that have tenants should seriously consider having prepaid meters installed so that tenants can pay for their own electricity and monitor their usage. Even Eskom would agree with this taking into account they are trying to reduce consumption and even place penalty fees on exceeds consumption.
Landlords with all inclusive rental and electricity are not helping the grid, nor are they helping themselves to maximize the income they should be getting from their properties.
Author Resource:-
Sean Wheller is the founder of www.PrePaidMeters.co.za, a PrePaid Metering provider, dedicated to create efficiency in metering electricity and water for the benefit of both tenants and landlords.
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