How to Outsmart Energy Loss (and recoup more of tenant expenses)

A quick but powerful story on the value of backups, in this case in the form of a check meter.

Though one day is never the same as another, we have a routine we like to follow at utiliVisor. Why do we like our morning routine so much? Because it pays off.

Every morning our systems engineers and billing analysts go through the data for the buildings on their respective accounts to see what's going on and to check for weirdness in the data – the kind of thing a human is good at. The building in this story was recently constructed and had had check meters installed in series upstream from submeters measuring load on multiple floors. The engineer assigned to this account was reviewing the daily data when he noticed something odd. The main switchgear meters were reading ~16 kW higher than the total of their downstream submeters.

When the building team was contacted about the discrepancy, they explained that a floor was being built out for the first time, which explained why readings had gone up recently. But it didn’t explain why the submeters and the upstream check meter didn’t reconcile.

We communicated what we were seeing reading-wise with the onsite team. Upon investigation, they found that one of the submeters, which had been installed during construction but never had load before the build-out, had been wired incorrectly. Since the meter had never had load before (and hadn't been validated), its wiring issues went unidentified for years, until the build-out placed a load on the satellite disconnect and the problem was noticed by our eagle-eyed engineer (this win goes to senior systems engineer Erich Hesse).

As we’ve mentioned a time or two before, about 33% of all meters are installed incorrectly. And if you don’t have them validated, your billing data may be riddled with gaps that blast holes in your NOI.

That’s exactly what was going on at this property. Without the check meter (and our engineer’s diligence) to identify that more load was going out than was being captured, the property would potentially have lost out on recapturing that expense, amounting to $36,000 in annual revenue. Not a bad ROI on that $5K check meter.

Recommendations

Check meters don’t have to be revenue-grade. But if the meters downstream from it ARE revenue-grade, then it’s worth making the check meter rev-grade as well to make the check meter as effective in its role as possible.

If you don’t have check meters in your building, here are some reasons why you might want to install some:

• The percentage varies, but at least some of your submeters will have some sort of problem over the course of the year. But that doesn’t mean you'll know there's a problem right away. In other words, some "fail" with a whimper, not a bang. Having check meters makes it much easier to identify when a meter is quiet-quitting.
• In addition, when submeters have a problem – whether it be a communication, wiring, bad multiplier, or other issue – check meters are a good backup to keep your billing and cost recovery on track, especially in a new building or with new tenants, with no history available to estimate billing data. (Another good reason to go with revenue-grade meters.)

If you're curious about what's involved in calibrating and verifying electric meters, this article is for you.