RV parks and marinas often focus on generating more revenue, but what about reducing operational costs? As the manager of an RV park or marina, you have a responsibility to ensure your guests have access to reliable power, but this is often one of the largest utility costs for outdoor properties. 

Regardless of how you charge your campers or boaters for utility costs, there’s now a new and improved tool to help you: smart electric meters.

Let’s explore how smart meters can optimize your utility management and enhance the guest experience at your property. 

What Makes an Electric Meter “Smart”?

Smart electric meters allow property managers to digitally track and analyze energy consumption, voltage regulation, and more for each site or slip on their property. 

With traditional meters, it’s more difficult to accurately gauge your property’s energy consumption or allocation since power usage varies by guest and the equipment they use. Since you won’t know how much energy has been used until your electric bill arrives, you can only react to this expense.

With smart meters, you can automatically charge your guests according to how much water and electricity they used during their stay. 

3 Benefits of Smart Electric Meters

1. Gives Guests More Convenience

Efficient utility management at RV parks and marinas requires more than just you and your staff monitoring energy consumption. Empowering your guests to do the same can create a cohesive, streamlined property.

Integrated smart meters with RMS allow your guests to turn their meters on and off from anywhere when utilities are not in use. This not only creates a worry-free process for your visitors, but it also results in less work for your staff who would normally manually turn these meters off instead.

Depending on whether you utilize pre- or post-pay metering, smart electric meters provide a more accurate and streamlined billing process, as guests will be charged exactly for what they used. It’s a simple process: the utility tracking begins at check-in and finishes at check-out. When integrated with your reservation management software, it automatically bills your guests for their usage. This removes any uncertainty for guests about how your utility billing works and gives them more autonomy over how much they pay.

2. Enables Efficient Utility Monitoring and Management 

Efficient utility monitoring is crucial for RV parks and marinas. Smart electric meters give you the most accurate insight into utility usage, preventing hidden costs from hurting your bottom line.

Unfortunately, many property managers don’t charge short-term guests for utilities because it typically requires staff to manually collect, enter, and invoice meter values.

Real-time, smart meter reads that feed into your reservation management database enable you to:

• Eliminate utility reading errors and hidden costs
• Reduce labor expenses
• Remove manual utility data input
• Streamline electricity billing and monitoring

With the capabilities of smart meters, water and power utilities can be read and managed remotely. This gives your staff the ability to do this from anywhere, saving time that can now be appointed to other tasks.

In addition to time-saving benefits, smart meters are also equipped with:

• Ground fault detection
• Cloud-based architecture that stores all meter readings and reporting

With these features, you can rest easy knowing that your guests are protected from malfunctions and that your operations are more streamlined, energy-efficient, and cost-effective.

Handle Guest Surges With Ease

During busier times of the year, an influx of campers or boaters can cause your utility bill to skyrocket and go unchecked without a smart meter. This can quickly eat into your budget and diminish your revenue.

With smart electric meters, you’ll be able to handle waves of guests with ease while also maintaining an energy-efficient property. 

3. Contributes to Overall Sustainable Energy Efforts

Creating an energy-efficient property with the help of smart electric meters comes with an added benefit: increased sustainability. 

Sustainability for Property Managers

Smart meters promote sustainability by allowing you to set energy-usage goals and monitor the progress you are making. 

For example, if you want to reduce the amount of energy being used at your RV park or marina, you can track the exact percentage with your reservation management software’s smart meter feature.

In fact, smart meters can reduce energy consumption by up to 30%, significantly reducing your utility costs and bringing your property into the sustainable age.

Sustainability for Travelers

The new age of travelers is looking for sustainable options and the latest technology. 

Smart electric meters offer travelers the opportunity to participate in more sustainable practices as well — all while helping to scale your processes to create a more profitable property.

Having this real-time data at your fingertips can help your guests be more aware of energy consumption, including when and how utilities should be used. This drives sustainability and promotes an eco-friendly RV park or marina.

Get Started With Smart Meters and Cohesive Utility Management With RMS

Implementing smart meters at your property can save your business time and money, so you can spend more time focusing on the guest experience.   

Now partnered with Wild Energy and MarineSync and UtilIoT, RMS can help outdoor properties streamline processes, maximize efficiency, and back your property with the latest technology.

To learn more about RMS and how we can help lead your business to success, download The Ultimate Guide to All-In-One Reservation Management Software today.