Brian Gaff wrote

Funnily enough I was asked the other day whether in the future contactless
credit and debit cards could be used for suck things

Corse they can, and not just in the future either,
used right now with vending machines.

at present its restricted to 30 quid a transaction,

Nope. You just need to supply the PIN over that
and there is no point of that when the phone has
a fingerprint sensor.

but wondered how often transactions could be made

As often as you like.

or perhaps on different cards.

Yep, pay with ApplePay, AndroidPay or SamsungPay.

That way you would not need to give anyone access to the account at all.

Yep, just like using a vending machine.

wrote in message
...
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.