Ron said:
It is not too uncommon for campgrounds to charge for electric when on a mounthly or annual rate, less common for weekly rate but I guess it does occur at some campgrounds.
Hi Ron:
That's what I have found as well.
Over the past years developing my park reservation SW, electric charge methodology was an item I had to visit more than a few parks to discover all of the ways it is done -- and I still find new stuff all the time. An important factor causing more ways of charging has been the sharp rise in electric costs to parks in the past 5 years or so - and that will vary according to the park location. AZ and CA have been hit especially hard.
One fact that I wasn't aware of prior to developing SW was that it is against the law for a park to make a profit on electricity. Haven't checked this in all states, but it is for sure true in CA and am told it it true in AZ. This is monitored by a state agency. While visiting one park in CA that uses my system, a surprise visit was made by two state inspectors. They spent about 2 hours going over the books, my SW, meters, and anything else concerned with how the park gets and charges electricity to each camp site. That park was charging 18 cents/KWH and it was determined that the park was actually paying 19 cents to get the electricity to each site. So it "is" OK for a park to lose money on electric.
To offset the "no profit on Electric", some parks will charge a "meter read fee" much like the electric company charges it's users. This "is" legal. The park cannot make a profit, but must pay for the meters themselves, someone to read the meters, buy SW or have bills done manually, and so forth.
A park in Lake Havasu showed me how they periodically meter overnight sites -- even tho charges are not by meter. The reason was to monitor the differences in actual KWH used by different size and type of rigs and people situations. Many parks do this. That same park owner finally sold his park because of the high cost of electricity. They were paying over .20/KWH and big rigs with ice makers, washing machines w/dryers and such were easily using any profit they could make from such an overnite stay. And they couldn't raise prices and remain competitive. During the hot summer months they just shut down because if a row was turned on by the utility company, they could not recover that minium cost (regardless of usage) due to slow summer rentals. Do you know how many RVers returning from QZ will spend one nite in an RV park, wash their cloths in the rig, wash the rig itself, and tons of other stuff that is all included in that one nightly stay fee??
A park has two choices w/50amp service. They can raise the advertised price, or charge a sur charge. Those that do the sur charge want to remain competitive with their pricing, but must recover their electric expenses to stay in business. Some advertise as such, some have it in fine print, while others don't mention it until you are registering for your site. Another factor is that it is easy to do or modify a sur charge, whereas the cost of changing the fixed site rate on web sites, advertising, and park literature can be very costly.
Monthly charges will either include electric, have an additional fixed electric monthly fee, or meter electric. I have a park in AZ with 400 metered sites. My program batch computes their monthly bills based on monthly readings. Doing that manually for 400 sites was very costly. Another park just charges a fixed fee for a monthly that includes electric. And another park computes how much electric has been used by all of their monthly non metered sites each month -- and charges all remaining monthly sites whatever it takes to recover that amount. The state inspectors approved their method of doing this.
So there are many methods of doing electric. We RVers try to eke all we can out of our electric service by switching everything to electric when buying a full hookup, whereas the park is trying to recover the cost of that electric and still make a profit. Unfortunately, it has sometimes caused a natural adviserial relationship between the RVer and park owner.