If you own or manage a commercial building with more than one tenant, you are almost certainly making one of two mistakes with electricity: either you are eating a cost your tenants should be carrying, or you are dividing that cost by a formula that has nothing to do with who actually used the power.
This is our crew installing a SATEC EM133 revenue-grade power meter — a submeter that measures exactly how much energy a specific tenant, unit, or piece of equipment consumes. It is one of the more quietly valuable upgrades a commercial property owner can make, and most buildings do not have it.
What submetering actually is
Your building has one utility meter. The power company measures the whole property at that single point and sends one bill. What happens to that cost inside the building is entirely up to you — and if you have multiple tenants, that is where it gets messy.
A submeter is a second meter, installed downstream of the utility meter, that measures the consumption of one portion of the building independently. Install one per tenant, per unit, or per major system, and you go from knowing what the whole building used to knowing what each part used.
The problem it solves
Most multi-tenant commercial buildings handle electricity one of two ways, and both cost the owner money:
The owner pays and absorbs it. Common in older leases. The building owner pays the whole electric bill and never fully recovers it. A tenant running servers around the clock, or a restaurant with walk-in coolers, or a manufacturer with heavy equipment pays the same as the quiet office next door. The owner eats the difference.
Costs are allocated by square footage. Slightly better, and still wrong. Dividing the electric bill by floor area assumes every square foot uses the same amount of power. It does not. The tenant with the data closet and the tenant with the storage room get billed identically. One is subsidizing the other, and both know it, which makes it a recurring source of tenant friction.
Submetering replaces the guess with a measurement. Each tenant pays for what they actually used.
Where submetering pays off
- Multi-tenant commercial and retail buildings — bill each tenant for actual consumption instead of absorbing it or allocating by area
- Office buildings — especially with tenants whose usage varies widely, from light professional offices to server-heavy operations
- Industrial and flex space — where one tenant’s equipment load can dwarf another’s
- Cost allocation across departments — a single company that wants to hold each department, production line, or building accountable for its own energy
- EV charging — metering charging stations so you can bill the actual cost of the power, rather than giving it away or guessing
- Common-area and house loads — separating shared costs from tenant costs cleanly
- Energy management — you cannot manage what you do not measure. Submetering shows you which parts of a building drive cost, which is where efficiency work actually pays.
Why the meter matters
The unit we installed here, the SATEC EM133, is a revenue-grade meter — accurate enough to bill from, which is the whole point. It measures far more than a running total: voltage, current, power, power factor, and four-quadrant energy, with data logging and communication built in so the readings can feed a building management system or a billing platform automatically. No walking the building with a clipboard each month.
That distinction matters. A cheap monitor gives you a rough number. A revenue-grade meter gives you a number you can put on an invoice and defend.
A note on billing tenants directly in New Jersey
There is an important line to understand. Using submeters to allocate and recover costs, to monitor usage, and to manage energy is straightforward and common. Directly billing tenants for electricity as a reseller can involve New Jersey Board of Public Utilities considerations depending on the arrangement and lease structure. Before you build a tenant-billing program around submetering, it is worth confirming the approach with your attorney and, where relevant, the BPU. We install and configure the metering; the billing structure is a decision to make with the right advisors. We are happy to talk through what the equipment can and cannot do.
The installation
Submeter installation is not a plug-in device — it is work inside live distribution equipment, as the photo makes clear. It involves current transformers sized to the load, voltage references, correct placement in the distribution, and configuration of the meter and its communications. Done wrong, the readings are useless or the work is dangerous. This is licensed electrical work, and for revenue metering, accuracy is the entire value.
Thinking about submetering your building?
Nextgen Electric installs and configures commercial submetering throughout North Jersey — single meters, whole-building tenant metering, EV charging metering, and departmental cost allocation. We handle the distribution work, the meters, the current transformers, and the communications setup, and we will tell you honestly what makes sense for your building.
Call (201) 321-8949 or contact us. See also our commercial electrical services.
