In spite of over 10 years of heat metering promotion in China, there still lays a certain gap between actual application and expectation. In this paper, the author conducts a comprehensive carding of China's current situation of heat metering in the aspects of policy, price, application area, technical roadmap, product quality and so on. An application effect evaluation model is established based on the geometric mean weights method. Assignments and weighs of factors in the model are achieved via multi-agent wide range of questionnaires. Comparisons are made among model results, results published by Liu Xin and the results released from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People's Republic of China (MOHURD), which proves rationality and high accuracy of the model established in this paper. Evaluation results show that application of heat metering in 2012 requires improvement with the score pegged at 60.7. It is suggested that policy support from national government should be strengthened, the impact of policies released by provincial government be curbed and heat metering pricing be increasingly reasonable. Application conditions of different metering techniques routes need to be clarified and relevant standards need to be revised to improve the operation. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.