Complaint Review: Minol USA

Minol advertises the submetering services as helping to detect leaks but they won't issue any sort of alert and, despite any admin fees charged, usually treat the end customer as a third wheel check-writer.  For a company that takes bi-monthly utility bills and converts them to monthly bills with additional 10% in various admin fees you'd think they'd be more responsive to customers who pay those fees.

I've had issues with a recent bill arriving 4-5x higher than normal with no contact from the apartment building management or flags from minol as to what's going on, just a demand to pay.  The company has daily reports from the type of submeter installed in my unit.

After having my property manager obtain those records I could see there are days with 600+ gallons of water being reported instead of the normal <30 gallons used by a 1 br 500 sq ft apartment with just a single person in it.  Customer service suggested "maybe he had some guests staying" and acted like the meter was reading fine.  For perspective, a normal faucet is about 1.5 gal per minute at full blast so 600 gallons during a day would be like a faucet remaining open for over 6 hours.  A few days like that as well as a few days where I was home but the meter recorded less than 10 gal being used show the extreme variability and, to me, indicated a faulty meter.

Several weeks later my property manager and minol have still not coordinated to get my meter serviced, and I am issued another bill with a monthly total now only 2.5x higher than my normal.  Water submetering sounds good, in theory, but the practice leads to additional overhead in tenant bills and increases the number of parties involved in disputes when things go wrong.