District Heating - Heat Metering

Heat Metering

Often heat is metered to customers using a heat meter, to encourage economy and maximise the number of customers which can be served, but these are expensive. Many communist-era systems were not metered, leading to great inefficiencies - users simply opened windows when too hot - wasting energy and minimising the numbers of connectable customers. Due to the expense of heat metering, an alternative approach is simply to meter the water - water meters are much cheaper than heat meters, and have the advantage of encouraging consumers to extract as much heat as possible, leading to a very low return temperature, which increases the efficiency of power generation.