Individual meters for an old apartment building

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davefoc

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Orange County, California
We would like to have the electric service upgraded in an old apartment building my wife and I own. We would like the upgrade to include individual metering, increased capacity and the elimination of non-code wiring. The building has seventeen units. Together with a house circuit we would need 18 separate meters.

I met with an electrician to discuss the project. The first big stumbling block is where to put the meters. The electrician shot down my idea which was to put them at the side because 36 inches of clearance is not available there to the fence. We talked about several other possibilities, but they are either unlikely to be acceptable to the power company or have some significant downsides from our perspective like having to move windows and/or give up a parking space with is highly valuable for us given that the building is located near the beach.

The panel meter arrangement suggested by the electrician was quite large. The assembly for every five (or possibly six meters) included a large box where the main service entered and was spit up to all the individual meter boxes, the individual meters and their associated boxes and small boxes for the cutoff switches. All together the assembly for five meters was about two feet wide by about five feet high and it sticks out about a foot.

I was wondering if there are any alternative approaches that might be applied here such as using remotely monitored meters in the individual units. I have looked around the internet a bit and found devices like that but I wasn't sure they were standard accepted solutions. There didn't seem to be any products along this line offered by more mainstream companies.
 
You're talking about my bread and butter here, now. I do a lot of these.

Lacking the proper clearances on the outside of the building itself, there's other options. Is there a garage where the meter pack could be installed on? A place in the parking area where a backboard arrangement could be mounted? The PoCo will often permit indoor metering if need be. The basement is one typical option. If there's a mechanical closet on each floor, having meters on each floor for that floor's units is another options. The attics in these old apartment buildings often have very high ceilings. I have already brought the service straight into the attic and put the metering equipment in the attic. Any of these indoor metering options need reviewed and approved by the PoCo, however.

I would suggest you schedule a visit by the PoCo engineer. The electrician might not be the best person to review your metering options with. The PoCo engineer is far more familiar with the special problems associated with multi metering, and is also more aware of what they will and will not approve. A meeting with him will give you your answer on where to put your metering.

EDIT... I think your idea of putting meters IN each unit is totally out of the question. There's no way any POCO is going to aprove that. Distributed cold sequence metering is what that's called, and it's only in textbooks. Noboby permits that, except when grouped in a closet on each floor of large buildings.
 
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mdshunk,
Thanks very much for the reply. Sorry, but what does PoCo mean? I think it is the public electrical utility, but I just couldn't work out what it meant for sure.

other mounting places:
Right now the leading candidate for that is a wall in the work shed. We would need to provide access to the utility company and that is not completely happy because we store a lot of valuable tools in there. We might be able to wall off a section though to create a dedicated meter room. But this solution also requires the installation of an underground cable from the utility pole. Places in the parking area seem to require the loss of a parking space so those don't seem viable right now.

Schedule meeting with the PoCo:
The electrician I contacted is going to do that next week. I'll post whatever comes out of that meeting. I hadn't thought about being there for the meeting. I wouldn't like the electrician to feel like I'm invading his space, but maybe I should bring the possibility up with him.

submeters in the units:
This is the most mainstream looking of the various companies that offer products for something like this:
http://www.submetercentral.com/
I'm not really interested in solutions that are pushing the envelope and it is hard to tell how mainstream this kind of thing is. I am also concerned about getting into the hassle of individually billing tenants for electric usage.

metering in the attics:
Access to my attic is too difficult for monthly meter reading and it is only about five feet high at the peak and is a fairly miserable place to be in general. I think the only possibility here is remotely readable meters which would be a nice solution if the electric company was ok with it.
 
Hey, if you want to submeter, more power to you. Most landlords would rather not be in the loop as far as billing goes. If you submeter, you'll still have one PoCo meter that you pay, and your own submeters to read to bill each tenant. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? :rolleyes: If I were you, I'd figure out a way to PoCo meter each unit rather than submetering. I can confirm that a submetering arrangement will deplete the value of your building in this present market. PoCo metering will increase its value. Additionally, I would absolutely be present for the meeting with the PoCo engineer. This is your bulding. Who gives a rat's backside what the electrician may or may not think of you being there. You might not have any input, but you should still be there in the interest of being fully informed.
 
My girls live in Orange County CA.
If I am not mistaken, there are no basements in most of the buildings there. Maybe by the beach or in some of the older buildings.

Dave
In order to have the service changed and metering added, you are going to have to compromise somewhat...your compromise seems to be giving up some of the "real estate" that you are tenuous about giving up.

Electrical eqiupment is larger today than in the past.


The metering you show in the link is "submetering". That is not the utility company's gig, that would be up to you and managing it would also be up to you. Managing it would also mean billing. I believe if you want to submeter for more than 6 dwellings, you will need to address this with the municipality.
 
Pierre C Belarge said:
and managing it would also be up to you. Managing it would also mean billing. I believe if you want to submeter for more than 6 dwellings, you will need to address this with the municipality.
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Excellent point. That may, at that point, require you to become a "public utility" of your own, subject to numerous laws a regulations regarding reselling electric. Consider submetering as your absolute last option.
 
c2500 said:
I will throw out that some states...such as mine...prohibit sub-metering.

c2500
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Well, maybe not exactly. You can submeter anything you want to. Trying to bill for it, however, is a different story.
 
Here's a layout of the building with the locations that we've considered for the panel. The building is shown in blue.
bldgLayout2.jpg


Thanks for the comments about sub-metering. They were the kind of responses I was looking for. It seemed too messy for what I was looking for and it seems like that is the general consensus here. I don't think it's illegal in California but there are restrictions and rules.

It is disappointing that a good, small multiple metering system doesn't seem to exist. It seems like it would be a technological slam dunk. The PoCo might like it. I'd be happy to add a phone line for it if they wanted it to be remotely readable.
 
when you say it is too close to the alley, is there a wall at the alley? Fence? if nothing seperates you, and you have your clearance's, why not there? ... or the shed.
 
mdshunk said:
What about mounting a backboard against the fence and putting it here?
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I like that idea. Parking is very tight and we would have to move back the cars a little there, but it might be doable.

ETA: I'm sorry, I missed your other two suggestions on the first go round. Both of the other two places you mentioned are the fronts of people's units and there are windows there and I know this is going to come as a shock to you guys here with all your cool electrical gizmos but they aren't the prettiest things and sticking them there wouldn't exactly be an asset to the aesthetics of the building.

SiddMartin said:
when you say it is too close to the alley, is there a wall at the alley? Fence? if nothing seperates you, and you have your clearance's, why not there? ... or the shed.
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The back of the building is very close to the alley. I don't know where the lot line actually is. The electrician said that we would need, at a minimum, if we put it there poles placed to protect the meters. The poles would stick out into the alley about as far as the telephone poles do so maybe they would be ok. He said that he thought the PoCo representative might be able to rule that idea in or out easily. If this idea is ok, then it looks like it might be the most straightforward.

The two possibilities on the shed are in it or on it on the side that is next to the patio. I'd hate to add something like this to the inside of the patio and both of the shed ideas involve running a cable underground to the meters and a cable underground from the meters to the main building. The building the shed is in is on a zero lot line and we can't stick the meters into my neighbors property on that side of the shed.
 
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Don't take this the wrong way but somebody has to say it.

You have to be more flexible here. If you want this done you are going to have to give up space somewhere to make it happen. There is no magic solution, the equipment is what it is and the code requires it to be installed with ver strict and clear workspace clearance requirements.
 
electricmanscott said:
Don't take this the wrong way but somebody has to say it.

You have to be more flexible here. If you want this done you are going to have to give up space somewhere to make it happen. There is no magic solution, the equipment is what it is and the code requires it to be installed with ver strict and clear workspace clearance requirements.
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I was thinking the same thing, giving up a parking space is probley the most practicle choice.
 
IMO, I think you need to hire a design professional. Someone that does this kind of work for a living might see some possibilities on you site that you are overlooking. Beachfront property in Orange County seems like quite an asset and would be worth your investment to have the metering project professionally designed.
 
jrannis said:
IMO, I think you need to hire a design professional. Someone that does this kind of work for a living might see some possibilities on you site that you are overlooking. Beachfront property in Orange County seems like quite an asset and would be worth your investment to have the metering project professionally designed.
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I do a lot of stuff myself, but this effort is well beyond something I would attempt. I started the thread with the hope of seeing if there were any ideas that the company I intend to hire has overlooked and to try and get a feel if it is the right company. I also wanted to get some feedback on the use of submeters.

I appreciate the comments greatly in this thread. It was exactly the kind of information I was looking for, although I continue to be disappointed that the PoCo's don't seem to be allowing some kind of small meters for multiple units like mine where space is at a premium.

What do they do in high rises and things like that where there might be hundreds or even thousands of meters? Are these done with sub meters with billing done by the building operator or do they have huge electric meter rooms?

The whole thing seems very outdated to me. I would have thought by now all utility metering on a property would go to a central collection point that could communicate with the utility offices.

ETA: I was just looking around for some information on high rise metering. It looked like there was one large access panel for lots of meters. The electrician I talked to suggested that one large access panel was required for every five or six meters. He also has a small box under the meter for a shutoff switch. Is he right about that or would one large box that feeds all the meters suffice? Could the large box also have shutoff switches in it?
 
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