Unlocking Water Savings: The Smart Water Meter Revolution for Businesses

In the last part of 2024, we here at SwitchWaterSupplier.com  started getting calls from property management companies and landlords.

A lot of people don’t really understand the way that their water bill comes in and how if you’re in a shared building or on a trading estate.

The bill comes in, you think it’s come direct from the water company, but actually it’s from the landlord.

In that situation you’re not paying for the water that you have used.

You might be paying a lot more, depending on what your neighbours use.

It’s a massive problem for asset managers, facilities managers and property management companies, there are hundreds of sites like these from retail to business parks to residential blocks.

You’ve got one meter supply in and then the landlord gets the bill and then apportions that bill on a square footage basis or another sort of assessed use basis. That’s fine for ease of use but let’s look at a big shopping estate. a coffee shop is going to use a lot more water than the bed shop next door.

Water companies are quite happy to keep that as it is because they’re only billing and reading one meter. The last thing they want to do is bill and read 35, 40 or 50 meters at any one time. It suits them to just be charging a landlord. But what’s driving this now is sustainability.

It’s a big issue for property managers, and a headache for tenants because they’ve got to report their water consumption. So if they’ve got sites all over the UK and they’re on business parks or retail parks, and they’re only paying on the basis of estimated use through one meter, then it becomes a problem for them to report back to head office with regards to their consumption, the water in and the wastewater out. Because they don’t actually have a separate meter supply, it does become a problem for their ESG reporting.

Here at switchwatersupplier.com we can go to these trading estates, buildings and retail parks, speak to landlords and say we can provide the answer: smart meters.

It’s the year of the smart meter.

You need to know what you’re using so we’re putting these sites onto our switching water supplier platform, getting consolidated contracts and then once that’s done, we sort out all the bills and survey all the sites for the installation of smart meters into each individual trading unit.

At the end of the month we’ll produce a bill via the landlord. When you get a bill, it will be direct from the landlord or a third party like ourselves, properly formulated. A water and wastewater bill, giving the volumes and that will go straight to the tenants so they’re actually paying for what they use as opposed to a square footage basis. It’s more transparent and it could save each business a lot of money as well as showing how well they’re using water.

Take any large town or city. You have large multi-occupied blocks with many businesses in there and just the one meter in the pavement. The landlord bills everyone a portion of that bill. Now we can get smart water meters in on each individual floor to the main feed to each individual business, floor by floor, unit-by-unit and get the data sent to a hub where it will be collated and sent to each individual tenant. You’re paying for exactly what you use, which is fantastic.

We’re a water solutions business. You have a problem, we have a solution and here we are, a brand new project for SwitchWaterSupplier.com!

Good for tenants. Good for landlords. Good for business in general.

Transparency is the way forward when it comes to water metering and certainly third party metering through switchwatersupplier.com can help you.