Winters on Lake Superior are long, and in a Marquette, Michigan rental full of Northern Michigan University students that means months of hot showers and taps left running against frozen pipes, all of it billed to whoever owns the building. Water submetering moves that cost to the people creating it. As the largest city in the Upper Peninsula, Marquette carries a real rental market of older homes and small apartment buildings held by individual landlords, much of it leased to NMU students by the academic year. None of them see a water bill, so none of them think about one. True Submeter puts an individual water meter on each unit and invoices every tenant automatically for exactly what they used, so you recover the full water bill. Usage settles down once it costs something, the back-and-forth over splitting it stops, and net operating income rises, with the typical payback inside six months. Nine months of cold is a long time to buy someone else’s hot water.
