this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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I had a disagreement with my previous landlord. He included power in the rent (not uncommon here) and I have a home lab.
He was not happy with the electrical bill and accused me of mining Bitcoin.
Sir, this hardware is from 2010, and couldn't possibly mine a single Bitcoin in the time it has remaining to run before it dies.
He threatened to evict me, I took his eviction threat documentation to a lawyer who basically told me that "this is not sufficient grounds to evict" (more or less he just laughed at how dumb it was), and I promptly ignored it. Moved out when my lease was up. There were a ton of other problems I won't get into. When he showed it to new potential renters some showed up before the agent who was showing the place and we gave them a warning about the landlord. I'm sure someone rented it eventually, but hopefully we saved a couple of people from going through all that.
I actually like the idea of landlords covering electricity or at least a portion of it. It incentives them to install things like heat pumps which have a high up front cost but long term savings. If they aren't sweating the long term loss then why would they upgrade?
Most places here pay for heating, not cooling. Heating is usually natural gas or similar, cooling by AC is up to the tenant, and there's usually a premium in the summer paid to run AC when electricity is included.
Heat pumps are for heating too, not just cooling.
Oh. I know. I'm just saying that since it heats and cools, it's not a priority.
Where I am there's no legal requirement to provide AC to tenants, so whatever heating system is cheap, that's what landlords will install. Natural gas is usually cheaper per unit of heat output than anything based on electricity, mainly in up front costs. A forced air furnace with no AC which is heated by natural gas is so common and therefore ridiculously cheap by comparison. For larger apartment systems, it's usually a central boiler that heats dozens of units. It's difficult and certainly not cheaper to cool the same amount of space.
Electricity being included is usually for smaller rentals, like rental homes or multi-rental properties, which haven't been outfitted with the required energy meters to individually separate electricity per rental, so, because doing that would require rewiring the property and adding several new service panels/electrical meters, which would easily be thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars (maybe more), most smaller landlords just don't bother. Since they can't differentiate power usage between tenants, they just charge a bit more and include it in the rent.
That was my situation.
I moved to a larger apartment building, that was built from the ground up to be exactly that, and each unit had its own power meter and service panel. I paid my own electricity there. Heat was brought in from a boiler, but air conditioning was up to the renter. No HVAC system was built into the unit. Newer apartment builds and especially condos here can have air handlers installed per unit (though, not always), which may or may not have AC.
It's very hit and miss, but the vast majority of portable AC sales is to renters, since they don't have another option if they want to stay cool.
Presently, I live in a house (we're not renting it), and this house has central AC. I'm planning to move to a heat pump eventually, and hopefully also install solar to offset electricity costs around the same time; probably in a few years when the roofing needs to be redone. Once the roofing is done, install solar, and then, hopefully in the same project, upgrade the forced air furnace to a heat pump system. Right now it's natural gas. I'm not keen on that.