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Multi-family housing has lots of issues like this. How can rooftop solar be managed for a multi-family building (especially a rental building)? For a smaller ap

by dhosek 4y ago

Multi-family housing has lots of issues like this. How can rooftop solar be managed for a multi-family building (especially a rental building)? For a smaller apartment building with a shared garage, even if you go through the expense of running electric lines to the garage tied to individual units’s meters, what’s to keep an unscrupulous neighbor from using someone else’s charger? I’ve been contemplating buying a rental building and I’ve been trying to figure out these sorts of things. I’m thinking having some sort of charger where the car owner has to enter a pin to identify themselves (and thus be billed for their electric use) is the best approach to the charger issue, but I’m not sure if there’s a good way to manage rooftop solo for a 2–4 unit building.

xani_ 4y ago
One way would be having charger have an app and charger itself be managed by utility company, then just add the charging costs to the electric bill
toast0 4y ago
A multifamily building should have one meter per unit, plus one for common areas needs like garage and pathway lighting, etc. Rooftop solar would be best put on the common area meter, but that's not ideal under most net metering regimes because the common areas won't have much draw. If you add charging stations and those charging stations are actually used, then that may give you enough usage to offset your generation or at least a meaningful portion. I'd put in something like a chargepoint charger and set the kWh price to about the local average electricity prices, and maybe help your tenants get chargepoint rfid tags. If you can put a publicly accessible charger at the street as well as tenant only chargers, that would again help you make economic work of your solar panels. You could also run the whole building on one utility meter, and include electricity in the rent... But that's asking for cryptocoin miners or grow operations as tenants.

by dhosek 4y ago

xani_ 4y ago

One way would be having charger have an app and charger itself be managed by utility company, then just add the charging costs to the electric bill

toast0 4y ago

A multifamily building should have one meter per unit, plus one for common areas needs like garage and pathway lighting, etc. Rooftop solar would be best put on the common area meter, but that's not ideal under most net metering regimes because the common areas won't have much draw. If you add charging stations and those charging stations are actually used, then that may give you enough usage to offset your generation or at least a meaningful portion. I'd put in something like a chargepoint charger and set the kWh price to about the local average electricity prices, and maybe help your tenants get chargepoint rfid tags. If you can put a publicly accessible charger at the street as well as tenant only chargers, that would again help you make economic work of your solar panels. You could also run the whole building on one utility meter, and include electricity in the rent... But that's asking for cryptocoin miners or grow operations as tenants.