Choosing the Right Water Submetering Solution for Your Rental Property

These days, running a rental property business is hard work. You have all of the usual problems: maintenance schedules, all manner of disputes, unexpected issues and emergencies… and you have to figure out the best way to manage your tenant’s utilities.

Whether it’s because of state-mandated requirements or because you’re looking to future-proof your water metering setup with innovative modern technologies, the issue of water submetering solutions is an important one. The right solution can save you money in the long term, improve tenant satisfaction, and improve operational efficiency – so it makes sense to get it right the first time.

What is Water Submetering?

Water submetering is a system that uses multiple individual water meters to measure consumption for each unit in a multi-unit building. This enables water usage to be tracked accurately at the unit level. It differs from master metering, where a single meter serves the entire building, making it impossible to determine individual consumption precisely.

With submetering, each unit is equipped with its own meter, allowing property owners and managers to access accurate, real-time consumption data. This level of visibility supports fair billing, leak detection, and better resource management.

Water submetering solutions are available from many trusted and reputable providers such as Mainlink. Whether it’s a small property or a large multifamily complex, there’s a submetering system that can be tailored to your needs.

Why is Submetering Important?

One of the primary drivers of submetering adoption is regulatory compliance. In some states, accurate unit-level metering in multifamily properties is required for individual billing, and non-compliance can lead to legal and financial risks.

Beyond compliance, water submetering delivers practical, measurable benefits for property owners, operators, and tenants alike. These benefits can be grouped into four key areas:

• Transparency and fairness: Accurate, unit-level water consumption monitoring allows tenants to easily understand how their water use directly translates to increased or decreased bills. This eliminates disputes over shared costs and can improve tenant satisfaction.
• Water conservation: Because their consumption directly impacts their own costs, submetering incentivizes tenants to use water more responsibly. This can help meet local, state, or national water conservation goals. Todd C. Quarterman, president of the Rochester, New York-based WaterWatch Corporation, suggests that “with water submetering, total consumption will decrease around 20 to 25%,” while Pacific Northwest National Laboratory research suggests submetered units reduce water consumption by 15%.
• Leak Detection: Advanced submetering can help owners and managers detect leaks much more easily by tracking submeter readings. When one submeter shows a significantly increased usage, this points to a problem in a specific area. Focused leak, burst detection can lead to reduced maintenance and operating costs.
• Data collection: Submetering provides massive amounts of usable data for property owners and managers to use to properly target interventions, upgrades, and maintenance. By utilizing this data to make strategic, data-driven decisions, owners and managers can enhance building efficiency and effectively reduce maintenance and operating budgets.

Tips for Choosing the Right Submetering Solution

Upgrading to a full water submetering solution is a significant investment, so it’s essential to carefully evaluate all factors before making a decision. Partnering with a reputable and experienced provider is the best way to ensure a smooth implementation, but it’s equally important to understand the fundamentals. Here are the key areas to consider:

1. Property type and installation requirements: Whether you’re going for a retrofit solution into an existing building or designing a new submetering system for an entirely new building matters. Some solutions are unsuitable for certain kinds of legacy hardware or systems. And an apartment building will have different requirements than a large mobile home park.
2. Features: Consider exactly what kind of submetering system you want to install. If you’re looking to meet the minimum requirements of transparent usage and accurate billing, you won’t necessarily need a solution with comprehensive tracking, data collection, leak detection, and instant alerts. But if you do want those things, it’s worth prioritizing a solution that can provide them. 
3. Communications and other technologies: Communication technology varies and each one is good at different things, so consider which ones best meet your needs. Whether you need a wired or wireless connection, for example, or whether an off-the-shelf solution is unsuitable due to your building’s unique setup. Some communications protocols come with additional, ongoing costs, so this is something to be aware of.
4. Billing Management: Some solutions offer seamless integration with billing systems, enabling automated invoicing and providing tenants with improved clarity.
5. Regulatory compliance and security: If you’re installing a solution to meet local, state, or national-level regulatory requirements, you need to be sure that the solution chosen meets those requirements. It’s also important to understand the data security implications of any systems or platforms used in the solution, so that you as the landlord can be confident that your tenants’ data isn’t being used illegally.
6. Service and longevity: Consider whether your provider offers ongoing support for the solution, its average lifespan, and whether their solution is hardware-agnostic. Some providers will lock you into a particular ecosystem, which can make upgrading or switching providers at a later date difficult and costly.

Conclusion

When you’re making a decision this big, it’s vital that you talk to the experts. A reputable provider will be able to answer your questions, will have expert knowledge of regulatory requirements, and should be able to help you find the perfect solution for your rentals.