Lessons from the AU model

Tue Jan 22 12:01:36 UTC 2008

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Sean Donelan wrote:

> If there was one tenant that left the hot water running 24 hours, 7 days a 
> week; so other tenants complained they didn't get enough hot water. One

That has never happened to me. We have good enough infrastructure that one 
tenant filling up their hot water bath doesn't deplete the infrastructure 
of "hot water production" in my building. I seriously doubt anyone would 
notice me running hot water 24/7, because the infrastructure is able to 
handle that. No, everybody can't do it, but if I need to for a couple of 
hours, it works.

> tenant plugged in maximum wattage heaters on every circuit and left them on 
> high 24 hours a day; left the television volume turned up to the maximum 24 
> hours a day; and so forth.

I know people who run servers in their dorms due to this. It might go 
away, power is easy to meter.

> If you were the neighbor of such a tenant in a building, would you be 
> pleased that your monthly fees were being increased or that one tenant 
> was using all the hot water and generating a lot of noise all day and 
> all night?  Or might you complain to the landlord about those problems.

Your analogy is halting, but that's to be expected. I certainly wouldn't 
want to pay more for the landlord to install metering everywhere. There is 
much overhead in metering and billing on that.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se