Insight into your usage – meter readings
I can’t read my meter. How do I know how much energy I’m using?
The amount of energy you’ve used is stated on your year-end bill from Stadswonen. If you have your own contract with an energy supplier, you’ll receive your year-end bill directly from them. This final bill states the amount of gas or heat and/or electricity you used over the whole year.
Most of our buildings do not have individual meters for each room or unit, which means you do not have a meter you can read yourself.
Why don’t all the rooms and units have individual meters?
Most of our properties only have a single, communal meter for the whole building, and do not have individual meters in the rooms and units. There are several reasons for this:
- Installing individual meters for separate billing costs money, which would result in you getting higher bills.
- The showers, kitchens and toilet facilities in our buildings are usually shared between several tenants, making it virtually impossible to measure how much each person uses of each utility.
- Measuring usage and billing on an individual basis is extremely difficult in large student buildings, where tenants move in and out a lot. Doing this would be very time-consuming and result in higher costs.
Can I see the energy contract Stadswonen has with the supplier?
No, that is not possible. Stadswonen Rotterdam is part of Woonstad Rotterdam, who purchase gas and electricity in bulk for the entire portfolio of properties. We don’t have contracts for individual buildings and do not share our three-year contracts with our tenants. You may, however, always view the invoices we receive for your particular building.
How do you calculate individual heating costs for tenants in buildings with a shared meter?
Each accommodation is given a weighting based on its size. 65% of the building’s energy costs are allocated according to these weightings. The remaining 35% is divided equally between all the accommodations. Each building’s total energy costs are therefore divided by taking the individual weightings into consideration.
If you moved into one of our accommodations part-way through the billing year, we consider how many “cold temperature days” you were there for. This is a legally mandated calculation method when the energy supplier’s annual billing cycle is out of sync with the period of tenant occupation. This method assumes that more energy is used when the outside temperature falls below 18°C. A good way of illustrating this is to think about how your advance monthly payments tally against the costs you actually incur month by month. You pay the same amount each month, which means in the summer you pay too much and in the winter you pay too little. But over the course of the year, it all balances out. If it happens that you are only renting a particular place during the colder months, then you’ll have contributed too little via your monthly payments, so we’ll settle this by using the “cold temperature days” method.
