CorbelworksUTILITY & TELECOM RECOVERY

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Size your own exposure

Four calculators for the defect classes that carry the most money in multi-site portfolios. They run entirely in your browser — no values you type are transmitted, stored, or seen by us. Each one shows its arithmetic so you can argue with it.

What these are and are not

These are sizing tools built on physical constants and published industry rules of thumb. They tell you whether a defect class is worth investigating on your own bills. They are not an audit, and no output here is a claim that your utility owes you money. Only your actual invoices, read against your actual filed tariff, can establish that.

1  Sewer billed on water that never reaches the sewer

Sewer service is typically billed as a percentage of metered water volume. Water that evaporates from a cooling tower or pool, or soaks into irrigated ground, never enters the sanitary system — but you are usually charged sewer on it anyway. Most utilities offer an evaporation or irrigation deduction. Filing for it is the operator's responsibility, and most never do.

0 if you have no evaporative cooling
~1,500 north, ~2,500 mid, ~3,500 deep south
Total uncovered water surface
1 acre ≈ 43,560 sq ft
From the sewer line on your bill
Varies by utility; many allow 12–36
Assumptions. Cooling-tower evaporation at 3 gpm per 100 tons at design load (standard cooling-tower rule of thumb). Uncovered pool evaporation at 0.25 in/day. Irrigation at 27,154 gal per acre-inch (geometric constant). Real credits require the utility to offer a deduction and usually a deduct meter or an engineered calculation they accept. Actual tower evaporation varies with wet-bulb temperature, cycles of concentration, and load; a submeter beats any estimate.

2  Portfolio recovery band

The blunt sizing question: across every site you operate, how much of your utility and telecom spend is billing error rather than consumption? This applies a published industry error band to your portfolio spend. It is arithmetic on an assumption, not a finding.

Full-service hotels commonly $200–300k
Ours is 35%. Industry runs 35–50%.
Assumptions. The 3–8% default band comes from published utility-audit industry literature, which is vendor-sourced and not independently verified. We show it because it is the number the industry uses, not because we have validated it. Your portfolio's real rate could be zero.

3  Demand ratchet exposure

Many commercial electric tariffs set your billed demand to a percentage of the highest peak recorded in the trailing eleven or twelve months. A single spike — a failed control sequence, a commissioning test, a chiller and a boiler running together at 2am — then sets a floor under every subsequent bill for a year.

From the demand line on your bill
Commonly 60–95% depending on tariff
Assumptions. This prices what the ratchet costs you. It does not assert the charge is improper — a ratchet correctly applied to a real peak is a legitimate charge under the tariff, and paying it is the price of the load. The recoverable cases are metering artifacts, ratchets applied outside the tariff's own terms, and spikes traceable to a failure the utility or a contractor caused. Establishing which one you have requires interval data.

4  Circuits still billing after they were cut

Analog lines for elevators, fire panels, alarm circuits, fax and modem lines at properties that were renovated, rebranded, or sold. The carrier bills until someone tells it to stop, and the disconnect order frequently never gets issued.

Often 12; check your tariff or MSA
Assumptions. Forward savings are realized once the circuits are actually disconnected, which takes a disconnect order and confirmation, not just a phone call. Back-credit is capped by the carrier's tariff or your master service agreement — most cap disputes at twelve months, and the clock runs from the invoice date, so delay destroys value here faster than in any other category.

If a number here looks big

Send three months of bills for one property and we will tell you in writing what is actually there — including if the answer is nothing. No cost, no contract, no system access.

Send bills for one property