On Saturday, 28 January 2017 12:49:24 UTC, wrote:
I gather that if I had smart meters installed, I could top up using
a mobile phone, which sounds more convenient. However, I am thinking
of letting my house out to successive short-term holiday tenants
during the summer, and want the tenants to pay for the gas & electricity
they use. Would switching to smart meters still make sense in this case?
Is it easy to enable the tenant to top up the gas & electricity using
their own phone and bank account - or are there obstacles making this
impractical?

Changing to credit meters would almost certainly give you significantly cheaper electricity.

Topping up token meters usually has a minimum amount and this is probably the same with smart meters. if a tenant only uses £1.50 of lecky he won't want to top up a fiver's worth. There might also be issues with giving tenants access to your utility accounts - suppose one closed your account and got your balance refunded to them?

If you had smart meters with online account management you could check the use at the start and end of each let, and work out what each tenant owed, and deduct it from the deposit.

Or you could use a private submeter (which must be MID or Ofgem approved) and charge from that.

With most holiday lets you (or someone) would do a changeover visit to change bedding / clean / handover keys etc so could read the meters at that time.

Owain