@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:Here (downtown Toronto), the parking spots are usually bought separately from the condo unit and there are costs levied related to maintenance of the garage that go only to the owners of the parking spots. If people have outside spots, they'd already have access to outlets for the block heaters and battery blankets (in Ottawa, they'd probably use both in a cold winter).
But how are electricity costs assessed? Clearly, in the Ottawa case, the outlets running to the parking spaces aren't individually metered (that's the whole point of the story), so there must be some kind of sharing arrangement. Presumably, everybody pays the same amount for a parking space, and everybody with a parking space pays a portion of their fees for electricity. So it's still a situation where everybody pays for everybody's electricity usage -- it's just that it's everybody with a parking space paying for everybody's usage of the electric outlets that are located at each parking space.
I imagine that a fully electric car doesn't need a block heater, since there are no liquids in the engine that can freeze. So the guy with the electric car would actually be using less electricity to charge his car than some guy using a block heater to heat his internal combustion engine.
He should be the one complaining about everybody else's profligate use of electricity.
I'll just add that none of this applies to my situation. We don't pay extra for our parking spaces -- they're assigned one to a unit. And our lot doesn't have any electric outlets except for the one that's on the side of the building. It gets cold around here in the winter, but not Canada cold.
