HIGH ELECTRIC BILL MYSTERY

There’s a condo complex in the city that’s earned a reputation—for all the wrong reasons. It’s not the usual gripes about noisy neighbors or faulty elevators. It’s the electric bills. And they’re absurdly high.

Take this: a friend of mine lives in a 50+ sqm one-bedroom unit. She only runs the AC at night and on weekends, yet her monthly bill hovers around P12,000. Another resident said theirs once hit P20,000—for the same unit size. What gives?

The culprit? A centralized, water-cooled chiller system—essentially a massive air-conditioning system shared by the entire building.

According to someone familiar with the setup, the one-bedroom units were fitted with 5-ton fan coil units (a fan that blows cold air from the pipes and into the unit)—roughly equivalent to a 23-horsepower motor. Even if that’s a stretch and it’s actually a 3-ton unit, that’s still around 14 horsepower. For a one-bedroom, that’s serious overkill.

This is textbook overdesign. The developer likely standardized a large-capacity unit across all room types.

To drive the point home: one tenant who liked to keep the AC running 24/7 got a call from the building admin. The upstairs unit had water condensing on the floor—from the cold seeping through the slab. They had to install insulation just to stop it.

So if you’re apartment hunting and come across a place with centralized AC, make sure to ask what the electric bill’s like. It might cool you off more than the air-conditioning ever could.