Manufactured Housing Communities
Manufactured Housing Communities face unique challenges in managing water resources efficiently while keeping costs low and residents satisfied. From maintaining infrastructure to meeting sustainability goals and ensuring accurate billing, these tasks can be daunting. But with Metron, you’ve got a trusted partner to help you overcome these challenges.
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Stop Settling For RUBS: How Water Intelligence Elevates MFH and MHC Utility Billing
Manufactured Housing Communities
Manufactured Housing Communities face unique challenges in managing water resources efficiently while keeping costs low and residents satisfied. From maintaining infrastructure to meeting sustainability goals and ensuring accurate billing, these tasks can be daunting. But with Metron, you’ve got a trusted partner to help you overcome these challenges.
White paper!
Stop Settling For RUBS: How Water Intelligence Elevates MFH and MHC Utility Billing
WaterScope® MHP – At-a-Glance Software
Designed specifically for the MHP market, WaterScope MHP empowers owner/operators of manufactured housing communities to track water usage and costs across a portfolio of parks and to support their park managers. Park managers can use the tool to support their residents and identify leaks in homes or in water infrastructure. Its modern, intuitive user interface makes it easy to find what you need to know.
Water Submetering
Water submetering is a crucial tool for Manufactured Housing Communities, providing precise measurement of water usage per unit by installing a submeter on each home to track individual usage. Metron’s meters are equipped with cellular connectivity, which allows them to transmit data automatically every day, eliminating the need for manual meter readings. This real-time data transmission not only ensures that residents pay only for the water they use, promoting fairness and accountability, but also provides property owners and managers with several key benefits.
With cellular connectivity, you receive daily updates on water usage, enabling more accurate and timely billing, reducing disputes, and fostering transparency. The automatic readings also save time and labor costs associated with manual reads, freeing up resources for other critical tasks. Additionally, Metron’s system can send real-time leak alerts, allowing for immediate action to prevent water waste and minimize damage. This proactive approach helps to lower operational costs, conserve water, and extend the longevity of your community’s infrastructure.
Granular Water Usage Data
Metron’s technology gathers usage data every 60 seconds, providing unparalleled data granularity. All this detailed information is easily accessible within the WaterScope® web platform, allowing community managers and residents to fully understand water usage patterns and identify potential waste. By quickly spotting and fixing leaks or monitoring excessive water use, like vehicle washing, in WaterScope, you and your tenants can significantly reduce waste. Additionally, with our new Master Meter monitoring device, Metron can help improve recapture rates by detecting infrastructure leaks that might otherwise go unnoticed. This platform also enables proactive water management, helping to promote conservation within your community.
Streamlined Billing
Metron’s hardware and software seamlessly compile water usage data and present it in an easily understood format for both you and your residents. We offer a variety of billing options to best suit your community’s needs. By gathering your water rate information, we can generate invoices to bill each occupant for their exact usage. These billing services are available monthly, ensuring accurate and timely billing without the costly errors of manual meter reads. Metron also offers an API to connect with many billing software packages you use for invoicing. With Metron, your billing process is simplified, efficient, and adaptable to your specific needs.
Improved Resident Satisfaction
Informed residents are happier residents. By providing access to Metron’s WaterScope dashboard, residents can monitor their water usage in real-time, helping them identify leaks and avoid surprises on their bills. When questions arise about higher-than-expected usage, the data is readily available to resolve concerns quickly and efficiently.
Reduced Maintenance Costs
With over 30 years of experience in the water industry, Metron has engineered the most reliable and durable meters available. This means fewer repairs, replacements, and maintenance needs, leading to more consistent meter readings and lower long-term costs for your community.
ESG Data at your Fingertips
As water sustainability becomes increasingly important, Manufactured Housing Communities may need to report on environmental metrics. With WaterScope, gathering the necessary data for sustainability reports is simple, ensuring your community can meet these requirements without adding extra work for your team.
Try our MHP ROI CALCULATOR
We’ve heard from others in the industry that a 75% recapture rate is often considered standard. But with the data and visibility provided by Metron, we’ve been able to significantly exceed that benchmark and hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Gerald Van Tassell, Havenpark Communities
Utility bills are a top-three expense at the community level—sometimes even higher than payroll. So improving recapture doesn’t just save money; it directly strengthens each community’s financial performance and long-term sustainability.
Gerald Van Tassell, Havenpark Communities
What I like about WaterScope is that we don’t have to rely on community managers to dig into the data themselves. We can create processes and reports that make the whole thing easy and intuitive, and let managers know with certainty if they have water or meter issues on their property.
Gerald Van Tassell, Havenpark Communities
Metron lets us cut our utility expenses while also reducing waste and encouraging a conservation mindset among our residents—and that’s a huge win for everyone.
Gerald Van Tassell, Havenpark Communities
Metron has a huge leg up on the competition with how easy it is to integrate WaterScope with Manage America for billing. The fact that they can reliably get a property onboarded so quickly is a huge benefit as it avoids missing a billing cycle.
Thomas Hess, Havenpark Communities
Case Studies
Frequently Asked Questions
What is water submetering?
Water submetering is when water meters – called “submeters” – are placed after the primary utility-owned water meter. The utility doesn’t see the data from the submeters; instead, the owners and/or managers of the mobile home park can see the water consumption data of the submeters.
Where would submeters be placed in a mobile home park?
The most helpful deployment is to put one submeter at or under each home in the park. Additional submeters could be placed on features such as irrigation, a swimming pool, or a clubhouse.
Why is submetering useful for a mobile home park?
If every home in the park has a water meter, park managers and owners can see the exact water consumption of every home. This allows accurate billing, instead of using, say, RUBS (Ratio Utility Billing System) to allocate fees. In addition, it becomes possible to identify leaks in people’s homes, which lets the park manager alert the tenant. Finally, if the master meter is also monitored, it becomes possible to identify infrastructure losses such as leaky lateral pipes.
Do I need to connect power or network to the submeters?
No. Metron’s submeters are self-contained devices with long-lasting internal batteries. They transmit data directly to the local cellular network (Verizon or AT&T), with no physical connections needed. Once the meters are installed, data will show up in WaterScope on the next day.
How does submetering affect recapture rate?
By accurately billing tenants for the water they actually use, and by identifying and repairing infrastructure leaks, you can recapture revenue for almost all of the water consumed by the park.
Is submetering required by law for mobile home parks?
It depends on your location. Some states, such as Colorado, are now mandating submetering per home. Talk to your lawyer to find out the regulations in your locality.
Does Metron offer meters for MHP submetering?
Yes. Metron’s residential meters, whether single-jet or ultrasonic, are great solutions for metering individual homes in a park. Metron typically leases meters and provides subscriptions to WaterScope, which allows park owners, managers and even tenants to see their water consumption data.
How do park managers and owners get to see their water data?
Metron’s WaterScope online software platform provides everything you need to understand how water is managed in a park – or even in a complete portfolio of parks. Subscriptions to WaterScope accounts are included in the meter lease agreement with Metron.
How does WaterScope generate monthly bills?
WaterScope doesn’t generate bills as such; instead it’s easy to use WaterScope’s integrations with platforms such as ManageAmerica and RentManager to transfer water usage data into your preferred billing platform.
Do submeters ever freeze?
Submeters in a mobile home park are often placed in the space under the homes, behind the skirting. To avoid freezing, an insulating box or lagging should be placed around the meter, as well as heat tape which should run along the exposed lines and through the meter’s insulation. If properly installed, freezing should not occur. Note that Metron’s meters will report in WaterScope if there’s a freeze risk from low temperatures, which may indicate inadequate insulation.
Submetering Information for your Residents
Submetering in a manufactured housing community is a powerful tool for water management. It’s important for your residents to understand how submetering helps them, so we’ve created a flyer that you can email or print for distribution to your residents.
Download here (these will open in a new tab in your browser):
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