House electricity
As house current or General Power part is operating costs referred that the power consumption affects the parts of the building shared by the residents.
Germany
The house electricity is not explicitly mentioned in the Operating Costs Ordinance (BetrKV), but can be interpreted as a component of individual cost items and thus allocated to the tenant in the operating cost settlement. Disputes in utility billing are often errors or ambiguities about which cost centers can actually be allocated as household electricity and which are not. The § 2 BetrKV serves merely as an incomplete explanation why especially the judgments of the house electricity billing in some cases decisive for the assessment.
Parts of the operating costs that can be allocated as domestic electricity
The costs arising from the general use of a residential complex can be passed on to the individual tenants in part from Section 2 BetrKV. The costs for lighting in the stairwell and in the entrance area ( Section 2 No. 11 BetrKV), the operating electricity for the heating and supply pumps ( Section 2 No. 6 BetrKV), the electricity costs for passenger and goods lifts ( Section 2 No. 7 BetrKV), the operating electricity for communal antenna systems ( § 2 No. 15 BetrKV) and the electricity costs for the operation of a laundry care facility accessible to all tenants ( § 2 No. 16 BetrKV) are listed as house electricity in the utility bill.
The charging of the operating current for the bell system is often considered a dispute. Many are of the opinion that the electricity required to operate the doorbell system should generally be deducted. Others argue against it that due to the lighting of the entrance panel, the bell also falls under the cost of general lighting and is therefore definitely counted.
Garages and car parking spaces are also a special form. The costs for the lighting there and the operation of electric gates or the like may also be offset if they are equally accessible to all tenants and such billing has been expressly agreed in the rental agreement. In any case, special costs for which the tenants are not responsible are excluded. For example, crediting for construction work or cleaning work is not permitted.
Determine and list the costs for house electricity
In order to be able to bill the costs incurred in a rental house for house electricity in accordance with the rules, the landlord must install a separate electricity meter to record general electricity consumption. Ideally, it should be possible to read the individual cost items to which the electricity consumption is allocated. If this is not possible, the landlord is obliged to estimate the individual consumption of all connected devices.
In the utility bill , each individual cost item should be listed individually in the costs for house electricity and credited to the tenant. However, there is no standardized procedure for this, and court rulings have not yet been able to agree on a fixed model. All you have to do is list the costs as detailed as possible.
The landlord must choose a specific distribution key to offset the total house electricity costs on the individual tenants. So he can decide whether he wants to distribute the total costs according to living space in m², according to the number of people within the individual tenants or equally across all residential units.
Web links
- Everything about general electricity in the operating cost accounting www.strompur.de, accessed on May 21, 2015
Individual evidence
- ↑ 2. Paragraph of the Operating Costs Ordinance
- ^ Hans Langenberg (Ed.): Operating and heating costs law, 7th edition . CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 3-406-66443-1 , p. 687 .
- ^ BGH, judgment of February 20, 2008, Az. VIII ZR 27/07, full text .
