Meters, Bills and Who Pays What

Utility arguments have a special talent: they arrive months after the facts, when nobody can check anything. "The bill was already huge when I moved in." "The tenant left owing three months of water." Both sentences are unanswerable — unless somebody wrote two numbers down on day one.

This chapter is about those two numbers, and the one lease clause that goes with them.

The handover readings

At move-in — as part of the Chapter 5 inventory — record the ZESCO meter reading and the water meter reading, and photograph both dials with the date visible in the photo's own metadata. At move-out, do exactly the same. Everything the tenant consumed lives between those two pairs of numbers. Everything before and after is not theirs.

Thirty seconds per meter. That is the entire mechanism.

Prepaid changes the shape, not the principle

• Prepaid ZESCO largely solves the arrears problem — the tenant buys units as they go, and what is on the meter at handover is simply worth noting so nobody argues about leftover units. Record the meter number too, so top-ups go to the right meter from day one.
• Postpaid (billed) supply is where the danger lives, because consumption and payment drift apart. The account stays in whose name? Who physically pays? If the tenant pays a bill that arrives in your name, how do you both know it was paid? Decide, write it in the lease, and keep the receipts in the tenancy folder.

Say who pays what, in the lease

One clause settles years of friction. Spell out, item by item: electricity, water, rubbish collection, security or estate levies, and anything metered or billed to the property. For each one — who pays, and who holds the proof of payment. "Tenant pays utilities" is too vague to settle an argument; a short list is not.

Ba Keys says: when a tenancy ends, take the final readings with the tenant standing there, the same as move-in. Two people photographing one dial is how a utility dispute ends before it exists.

A note on shared meters

One meter serving several units is a fight generator. If splitting the supply is not practical, then the formula must be in the lease — equal shares, per-room shares, whatever you choose — plus what happens when one unit is empty. Any formula both parties signed beats every formula argued about later.

Watch out: a departing tenant's deposit conversation and their final utility bill are the same conversation. Do the readings before the deposit is settled, not after — money returned is hard to un-return.

Next week: when rent is late — the arrears ladder, and the paper trail each step leaves behind.