For Step 2 in your DEXMA Demo, we’ll show you how to take advantage of submetering to analyse energy consumption.
In our earlier blog post we explained how to use the Analysis tab in the DEXMA Demo to uncover the worst performing, least energy efficient buildings in the international Corporate Buildings account.
Now, here’s for the fun part (at least for us energy nerds hehe) – investigating exactly where and when you are losing energy and money.
Here is when you get to go all Inspector Gadget on your energy consumption. You can hunt down the root causes of energy inefficiency in your buildings and take steps to fix them.
Here goes:
1. Login to your DEXMA Demo account.
2. As before, enter the Corporate Buildings account.
3. Select the Analysis icon on the top menu bar.
4. Now let’s select just one building in the Devices field, for example Luxemburgo Building. Another tip: type floor* into the Devices field to select all the floors in that building.
5. Select a Date range and Frequency (15m for the highest accuracy) and click Update.
6. By clicking and dragging your mouse across a certain area on the graph you can zoom in to see energy consumption at different times throughout the day. This helps you understand your facilities’ energy patterns. Can you highlight anything that looks weird?
For instance, let’s say all the employees in this building work between 8am and 7pm. If you are seeing overnight energy consumption – where is this coming from? Compare the energy being used with the energy you expect from overnight usage (e.g. servers, equipment).
If it looks higher than it should be, why is that? Maybe people are leaving computers or lights on unnecessarily, and so you need to investigate this and try out different measures to resolve it. Or you can compare energy consumption floor by floor to see if everything is as it should be. If each floor has the same number of people, but one floor is consuming more than the rest, why would this be?
7. What’s more, you can calculate your potential energy savings. On average 1 kWh of energy consumption costs you €1,000 annually. So, if you can pinpoint 20 kWh that you can save, this means €20,000 annual savings for your organisation. Nice! These are the sweet-sounding numbers which will please your CFO’s ears.
Want to calculate your savings potential right now – for free? Try Energy Grader:
In the next blog article we’ll show you how to monitor and verify your savings on energy efficiency projects. In the meantime, go off and have a play around with these submetering steps. And of course if you have any questions, we’re here, just get in touch!
