Electrical Usage by Association

I've just discovered that the association has been using my electricity for irrigation timers. This has been going on as long as I've lived in the community.

Electrical use was without any agreement between myself and the association. I'm of the opinion that I should be reimburse at a reasonable rate for the electrical service provided all these years. And, have an agreement for future reimbursement.

Also, any of you legal eagles - is there anything regarding treble damages for unlawful use (theft) of electricity?

We have a handful of homes where we tap into the owners electric service to power our irrigation timers. We reimburse $10 a year since forever.

Our HOA does use some owners electric service for common area irrigation. We reimburse them also.

Realistically, $80 per year would be really high unless you are also powering a pump motor for a well. Unless you plugged it into a kill-a-watt or some other metering device, it's hard to say how much the irrigation controller is actually using. The ratings on the power supply are just the maximum draw under full load, most of the time the controller is probably drawing close to nothing, just enough to keep time and keep an LCD display active. The controller will draw more when it is operating the solenoids to turn the water on, and even that would most likely be fairly less than the power supply max rating, and that will be for fairly small amount of time, probably a few hours a week. If I can find my kill-a-watt, I'll try it on my irrigation controller and see what typical draws are.

Kris,

With others, I do think your numbers are off.

Granted, electrical rates are different around the country, but my heat pump costs me $80 month.
I'm also curious how you determined the cost (disconnected to see the difference between normal use and use with the unit, amp meter attached to the line, etc.). I would suspect that the real amount may be (perhaps) closer to $100 or $120 for the 10 years.

I do agree that there should be some kind of reimbursement and an agreement with every new homeowner.

We use the electricity from one unit to power a controller, as the cost to run a line from the "community" power was too great. This was done by agreement with the unit owner and documented by Board resolution. The agreement was recorded in the land records so that future owners would be aware as part of the title search. We annually send the owner $60 which more than covers the electricity that we use.

This is a very good point. We had one owner who had a circuit (with a breaker on it) that ran one of the irrigation timer/controllers and also the owner's own extra refrigerator in his garage. The irrigation equipment caused a ground trip and the owner lost a fridge full of food. At least the warm beer was fixable.

HOA reimbursed him for the food and paid the bill for an extra dedicated circuit to be installed in his house. At the time we wanted to eliminate the need for the tap entirely, but it would have cost approx. $50,000 to have the local electric utility run lines to a new outdoor controller box on common property.

That was a few years ago. We're in the middle of a sprinkler system upgrade where the control wire runs to the solenoids use new technologoy (compared to the old system) that will enable control of all irrigation solenoids from one central location. When we're done there will be no need to tap into any owner's electric.