Designing a metering system
Introduction
This article intends to describe a method to design the energy measurement system of a commercial building.
The scope of this article covers all WAGES consumptions in “non critical” buildings. Critical buildings such as hospitals, data centers have specific requirements regarding power quality that are not covered here.
Proposed method
The method involves 2 steps :
Step 1 : Project definition
The step Project Definition shall be realized with the future users of the system and lead to define what are the performance metrics that will be part of the users dashboards.
Step 2 : Design of the different components of the measurement system
The purpose of the measurement system design is to ensure that the data collected will correspond to the desired analysis and results. This will allow the operation managers to monitor & control the building according to their objectives.
This will help to avoid :
- insufficient data to enable building consumptions analysis
- Too much measured and collected data that are never used. However the investment cost to collect these data and the data storage cost is not negligible and could have been used for other energy efficiency actions.
This step is split in 2 parts :
- Define the points of measurement
Some examples of usual point of measurements for: - Select the meters
- Select the electrical meters
- Select the gas meters
- Select the water meters
- Select the heat and cold meters
- Select the temperature sensors
