In the last email on hydro billing, I explained how difficult and time consuming the collection and calculation of 310 campsites hydro billing has become.

In this email I am going to try and explain how your hydro bill is going to be calculated in the 2027 camping season.

The Board Treasurer, Petty Wong, has done extensive analysis of the entire park’s hydro usage across multiple seasons and has detected a pattern. That pattern indicates that across the 310 sites in the park, there are 4 price points that every site falls into in terms of the hydro they use.

This has generated 4 bands that every site falls into for Hydro usage based on the year of 2025. These are:

Band 1 uses on average $100 of Hydro per year.

Band 2 uses on average $300 of hydro per year

Band 3 uses on average $500 of hydro per year

Band 4 uses on average $800 of hydro per year.

In 2027 this analysis will put everyone into one of these BANDS based on the average use of hydro over the 2026 camping season that accurately reflects each sites typical use over a complete season that falls within one of these bands.

So, each camp site has been designated into one of the above bands and some of you will pay more than you owe in the first year, but subsequent billing cycles will readjust your hydro portion of your bill in the next cycle.

To give you an example – Ignore Line 1 as that is your Maintenance fees which is displayed as a separate line item on your Invoice.

In this example your 2027 hydro estimate is made up like this;

Pre-paid in 2026 was estimated at $355.50 based on the old 3-year average.

The actual meter reading amount used was 2402 Kwh – 1576 Kwh = 826 Kwh BALANCE.

From now on, the invoice will also show the actual meter reading – for example, 12345 on line 2.

We credit your 2027 hydro with the 2026 prepaid of 1576 Kwh @ 0.141 cents per Kwh = $222.22.

Although 826 Kwh at 0.148 cents per Kwh = $122.25, there is a difference of 0.007 per Kwh for the 2026 estimate 1576 Kwh = $11.03.

At the end, the total hydro balance payment for 2026 is $133.28.

2028 billing

In 2028 the calculation will re-balance based on the actual usage in 2027.

So, in 2028 the Actual Hydro usage is 3759 Kwh at 0.148 cents per Kwh = $556.33.

You pre-paid $300 in 2027. So, for 2028 you now owe $256.33 for actual Hydro payment balance for 2027.

Again, to maintain the Bands you will be charged at the Band 3 rate of $500 for 2028 based on the total usage of 2027 $556.33.

In subsequent years your Hydro usage will rise and fall depending on what is going on in your life and no 2 years will be the same.

Now I appreciate that to most people this doesn’t look much less complicated than our current system. But there are clear benefits that makes this a more robust way of doing this vital work.

1. This will be easier for most people to understand and that will reduce the number of queries from confused shareholders in the earlier part of the year.
2. Fewer queries mean we get all our hydro and maintenance payments on time so we can run the park effectively and that reduces the amount of work that the treasurer needs to do to chase up these payments.
3. There will be far fewer mistakes in calculations made to the 310 invoices that have to be completed.
4. If you sell your site, you and the buyer can compare the current meter reading with the reading shown on the prior year invoice. No need to contact the office for assistance.
5. A small cost reduction in staff time especially for the Treasurers assistant who we hired to help manage the parks financial records.

So, we will adopt this system for 2027 and re-evaluate during the 2027 season, and a decision will be made towards the end of 2027 to either adopt this as normal business moving forward or to adjust if necessary to streamline this process further. Or simply revert to the old system if that proves necessary.

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An email, one of 3 has been sent to shareholders, the other two will be sent over the course of the next few days and are designed to explain a few fundamental changes that are being made to Hydro calculations that are displayed on the annual maintenance bills you all receive in January of every new camping season.

I will do my level best to explain this in simple terms so as not to overly complicate what is proposed.

I also want to make clear that this is a TRIAL to see if this proposal is more efficient than what we currently do.

The park as a whole uses around $110,000 of Hydro annually. Almost 80% of that is used by individual campsite owners. When the park sends out your Hydro bill it is based on your previous 3-year average use of hydro to generate a prediction of what you are likely to use in the coming year so the board can ensure that we have enough capital on hand to pay this bill across the camping season. So, we predict how much you are going to use and then we collect this in advance and use that to pay our entire hydro bill across the financial year. The small portion used to actually run the park is paid out of the operating budget.

In the past staff and a few volunteers have visited every campsite and taken a physical reading from the hydro meter attached to every trailer in the park of the actual Kilowatt hours of electricity that you have used. That reading is compared to the one taken 12 months previous and then its averaged across the last 3 years readings to generate your expected use in Kilowatt hours over the next year. You are charged 14.8 cents (in 2027) for every full Kilowatt hour of hydro that you have used across the previous season. Once this calculation has been made this is added to your annual Maintenance bill that is mailed in January 2027.

Collecting the data and then calculating 310 site hydro bills and then amalgamating that information into each maintenance letter has proven to be a very time-consuming affair. It involved 3-4 people working 8 hours a day each for an entire week to accomplish, just before Christmas. This is neither efficient use of our staff time nor fair to volunteers who do this work. It is also subject to errors in reading the meter, miscalculations and basic human errors.

The results were often misunderstood by shareholders that then required multiple emails and recalculations to verify that no errors have been made (there have been numerous errors in most years) that puts an unnecessary burden on our staff and particularly the treasurer and the assistant.

A new system that is more efficient and less burdensome has been proposed and adopted by the board of directors that will come into effect starting with the 2027 annual maintenance billing cycle and again this will be a TRIAL in 2027 to gauge efficiency before being adopted as a preferred method in future years. OR not depending on the results.

In the next email I will explain what the new method looks like and what it means for everyone’s bill in 2027. What happens if you use more or less hydro in 2027 and how that affects your hydro in 2028 with full examples for you to analyze.

So please watch for more emails on this subject over the next few days.

Spider Lake Springs Campers Association Board of Directors have changed their emails from gmail to outlook. These emails can be found under the Contact tab.

The next Board of Directors meeting is November 15, 2026.

For those that would like to join the meeting via Teams, please email the Board Secretary at slssecretary1@outlook.com at least one day in advance of the meeting and she will send you an invite.

The Spider Lake Springs Campers Association Board of Directors meetings are held the third Sunday of each month (except for December) at 10:00am in the resort. All Shareholders are welcome to attend or send questions to slssecretary1@outlook.com. Minutes are posted to our website.