How to Bill Tenants for Electricity: A Practical Guide for Malaysian Landlords
Three ways Malaysian landlords bill tenants for electricity, from splitting the TNB bill to smart prepaid meters, with the pros, cons and costs of each.
If you rent out rooms, units or shoplots behind a single TNB meter, you have to decide how each tenant pays for the electricity they use. Get it wrong and you end up absorbing the cost, arguing over the air-cond, or spending a day every month reading meters.
This guide compares the three common approaches and shows what it takes to set each one up.
Option 1: Split the TNB bill
The simplest approach: divide the monthly TNB bill equally, or by room size, between tenants.
Pros
- No equipment and no setup.
- Easy to explain.
Cons
- Unfair to light users. A tenant who is rarely home pays the same as one who runs the air-cond all night.
- Leads to disputes, especially in hostels and co-living.
- You still have to collect payment from every tenant every month.
Splitting works for a small house shared by people who trust each other. It breaks down as soon as usage varies a lot between tenants.
Option 2: Manual sub-meters
Install a basic kWh meter for each room or unit, read every meter at month-end, and invoice each tenant for their own usage.
Pros
- Each tenant pays for what they use.
- Basic meters are cheap.
Cons
- Someone has to read and photograph every meter, every month.
- Readings are typed into a spreadsheet, so mistakes happen.
- You only see usage after the fact, and you still chase payment.
- If a tenant doesn't pay, your only option is a site visit or a difficult conversation.
Option 3: Smart prepaid meters
Install a smart meter for each room or unit that connects to the cloud over 4G or Wi-Fi. Each meter has its own balance. Tenants top up, the balance drops as they use electricity, and supply cuts off automatically when the balance reaches zero.
Pros
- No meter reading: usage is recorded automatically.
- No chasing: tenants pay before they use.
- Each tenant can see their own usage and balance.
- You can switch any room off or on remotely, for example between tenancies.
Cons
- Higher upfront cost than basic meters.
- A small monthly platform fee per meter.
What a smart prepaid setup involves
- Choose the meters. Single-phase DIN-rail meters fit inside each room's distribution board; wall-mounted meters suit shared meter boards. Pick Wi-Fi if the building has stable Wi-Fi reaching every board, or 4G if it doesn't.
- Install. A registered electrician fits each meter into the board.
- Set your rate. Set the rate per kWh for each meter in the owner dashboard.
- Decide how tenants pay. Tenants can top up online by card, FPX, DuitNow or e-wallet, or you can collect payment your own way and top up for them.
- Let it run. Usage is deducted live. When a balance hits zero, the power cuts off. After the tenant tops up, you switch it back on remotely.
How much does it cost?
With Splinergy, a Wi-Fi meter is RM 130 one-time and the platform is RM 10 per meter per month on a 12-month contract. For a 20-room hostel on Wi-Fi meters, that is RM 2,600 for hardware and RM 2,400 for the first year of the platform. 4G meters add a data plan from RM 35 per SIM per year. See pricing for details.
Which option should you choose?
- 2 to 3 tenants who get along: splitting the bill may be enough.
- More than a handful of tenants, or frequent disputes: sub-metering is worth it.
- You're tired of reading meters and chasing payments: smart prepaid meters remove both jobs.
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