I've been asked to look into retrofitting a building on our campus with utility meters. We have a few older building that we don't have any real means of measuring energy usage.

I'd like to find out if anyone on these boards has experience in the area. I've spent a few hours on google and really turned up little to nothing.

We have our own electricians, but hiring outside contractors isn't beyond our resources.

Any ideas and comments would be of great use, thanks!

I have done that many times. It is easy to install a monitoring system to provide that information. The cost just depends on how accurate the data needs to be as it can be as easy as a simple current transformer and one of our BAS controllers or if it needs to be more accurate there are utility grade sensor to be used instead of a simple CT. Feel free to contact me directly if you need more information.

Alan Pong
alan_pong@comfortintl.com

Thanks for your reply. I'll pm you in a bit. We're doing electricity, water, and natural gas btw. Our water is supplied via a campus wide loop, which is metered, but only a loop wide basis, nothing more granular than that. Gas and electricity come off the suppliers grid to the whole campus, and again, we get one bill, nothing denoting how much each building is using.

I'd really like to just get a feel for the types of devices that we need to use. I've been mandated to go at it from an internal standpoint (ie, our tech will install the devices). I'm expecting they'll want it coupled with our primarily Siemens BAS.

Lol the past 24 hours has been just education into the how side of the problem.

Another thought is that it really is not that difficult to benchmark an entire campus based on the total consumption as what I tend to find is that the building age has zero correlation to energy efficiency. Odds are that if you benchmark the entire campus and it is high then virtually every building will likely have similar waste.

If your campus is mainly office with no more than about 15% 24/7 computer areas and assuming you are in the West Coast your campus should be operating between 11-16 kilowatt hours per square feet for electricity and I'd be glad to help you benchmark the campus just contact me directly.