Sub-metering

The Ontario government is considering legislation that would force tenants to pay their electricity bills directly.

The main problem with this is that tenants don't always have the resources to make their homes energy-efficient - the landlords would have to do that. To demonstrate how drastic the changes would need to be to make some apartments energy-efficient, here is a description of the heating/air conditioning system in my apartment, taken from a longer letter I am sending to my MPP and the energy minister.
My building has central heating and air conditioning. The hot or cool air, depending on the time of year, comes out through a vent that is located on the wall, about a foot below the ceiling. The intake vent is located on the same wall, directly below the output vent, and just above the floor. The thermostat is on the same wall, in between the output and intake vents, at about eye level. The whole setup is in a corner where the wall meets the windows, about eight inches away from the windows.

Anyone familiar with the basic principles of convection can see that this is problematic.

In the winter when the furnace is on, the heat is emitted near the ceiling. Heat, as we all know, rises. You can visualize the effect of this vent placement by picturing the heat as a fluid being poured into a container, except instead of flowing first to the bottom of the container it flows to the top. My apartment has to be "filled" with heat from the top down, and enormous amounts of energy are wasted heating the ceiling area before any of that heat gets down to where I am.

In the summer when the air conditioning is on, the placement of the output vent is not a problem, but the placement of the intake vent is. Because heat rises, the coolest air in the apartment is likely to be near the floor, and that air gets taken back into the HVAC system instead of being permitted to circulate around the apartment.

The placement of the vents near the windows is also problematic, because the windows are not very well sealed. They do close properly, but they are cheap and 30 years old, so there are drafts in the cracks and no attempt has been made to make the glass energy-efficient. I'm sure this results in some of the heat and air conditioning being lost by flowing directly out the window.

The placement of the thermostat is also very inefficient. Because it is so close to the window, it is affected by the weather conditions outside. For example, it may be sufficiently warm in the apartment, but a draft from the window might be blowing directly onto the thermostat, thus encouraging it to keep heating the apartment. I'm sure the fact that the thermostat is directly below the output vent and directly above the intake vent also means it gets an inaccurate reading.

The other problem with the thermostat is that it is not very precise. It is an old analog model that doesn't even mark the degree numbers on it. It is simply a knob that I can turn to "higher" or "lower", so I can't turn my temperature down a couple of degrees like so many people recommend. Even if I could, I don't know if it would make that much of a difference. Because of the location of the thermostat, on the wall directly below the output vent, directly above the intake vent, and inches away from the drafty window, it doesn't shut off when the apartment is suitably heated or cooled. One cold winter day, I did an experiment. I turned my thermostat to the very lowest level that still made the furnace be on - just one tiny increment above where the furnace shut off. It took the thermostat two days to shut off by itself, when the apartment was suitably heated within an hour or so.

With heating and cooling taking up 49.5% of the energy use in my whole life and over 2/3 of the energy use in my home (according to the One Tonne Challenge website), all the austerity in the world isn't going to make a significant dent in my energy bills. I already open my windows on cool summer nights, keep them closed through the cold of winter and the hottest part of summer days, close my curtains in the summer and keep them open in the winter, and turn on the fan above my stove to suck out hot air on hot days. What I need is serious renovation to change the locations of my vents, the quality of my windows, and the location and quality of my thermostat.

If the government insists upon passing legislation to make all tenants pay their own utilities, they must first make all landlords ensure that all rental units are reasonably energy-efficient, so that austerity measures on the part of the tenant can actually save energy.