Field note
Corridor lighting that still lives on the common-area total
A shop fit-out in 2014 may have a neat tenant meter. The corridor that serves the shop, the offices, and the night cleaner often does not. The panel sticker still says “house lighting” and the circuit runs the length of the ground floor.
When we walk a building for tenant-area notes, we follow those house circuits with the escort. If the dock sodium lamps and the carpeted lift lobby share a breaker, the common-area kWh will look “high” next to a modern office that already has LED panels on a tenant board.
Boards and tenants sometimes want a percentage split. Percentages without a meter are a policy choice, not a measurement. Our notes can record the hours the dock is used and the installed wattage we can see, then label the result as an estimate.
The honest sentence in a year-end pack is often: the common lighting was never separated. That sentence prevents a later argument that the offices “use more than they should” when the dock lamps ran until 05:00 for a tenant’s deliveries.