Managing Costs with Water Sub-metering and Energy Sub-Metering

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To manage your Energy and Water costs you need to find out what’s flowing where in your facility, initially through a survey or audit followed by ongoing water sub-metering and energy sub-metering of accountable areas.

Step one, consider your facility in operational terms with respect to the use of energy and water i.e. how does the facility breakdown in respect of the physical layout, departments and cost centres e.g. admin offices, R&D, production etc. And then step two, do a physical survey of the heating, cooling and water services to establish where it would be useful and viable to install water sub-metering or energy sub-metering to collect the information. At this stage it may be helpful to undertake some temporary monitoring and logging of your consumption to confirm your assumptions in respect of what’s flowing where and hiring or purchasing a portable meter like the PF330 from Micronics would enable you to do that.

Step three, deciding what or which form of water sub-metering or energy sub-metering to install. For heating, cooling and water services you could install traditional in-line sub-metering, this will require a disruptive and costly stoppage and drain-down of the various heating, cooling and water services circuits, or as a smart alternative you could use clamp-on, ultrasonic sub-metering. As the name suggests this is not disruptive i.e. no need to drain-down services or cut pipes! The U1000 range of clamp-on flow and energy sub-metering, simply clamp-on to your existing pipes to provide a flexible and cost-effective sub-metering solution. They’re low maintenance and flexible, as there is no potential for flow contamination, experienced with in-line meters and if you subsequently decide with use and experience that there’s a better position, it can easily be moved to provide energy sub-metering or water sub-metering for an alternative service or cost centre.