Building monitoring

[jfisher]

Hi I'm new and am fairly sure this is not in exactly the right place. But had a question that will need some intro first.

I work in a school that is looking to be more aware of what power (not just power but all utilities if possible) goes where within the school and at what times, in order to know better how we use energy and where we can save as the cuts start taking effect. So my question is does anyone know anything about building monitoring of utilities as most of the searches on line have shown home or small scale monitoring rather than large, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of software support (unless I'm an idiot which is entirely possible) for collating and making use of all the data.

Any and all input welcome on trying to come up with a working cost effective solution

[jfisher]

Got some more info after having a meeting with our site manager, the school has 16-17 sub distribution boards for power that each handle an area now all I need is how to monitor them effectively, wether I monitor just the incoming power to each board or whether I monitor where it distributes the power to in order to know which rooms are the most draining.
Some other thoughts are just monitoring one board at a time so we reduce waste in one portion of the school at a time. To do this however I need an effective metre that stores data for conditioning and review at a later date. (so that multiple sectors can be stored up and compared over time)

[MR GUS]

congratulations for taking the first step in reducing, although i must say it's sad that it's been ignored for so long by schools in general who just went on with it, when you have money t in the pot is time to make a start not when the cash rug has been pulled from under you,as it makes it far harder to operate in those circumstances.
Cash is a good as reason as any, but would have been better for you now if you'd started earlier.

Anyone on here would chant insulation & more insulation as a mantra, as when you reduce your energy output you save time & time again.
So battening boards with pir reflective insulation to walls in order to improve & seal in what's already there, "a test bed / monitoring classroom" atypical of what you need to resolve long term.

How are you tackling things currently , what measures in general? I guess you've got the standard school " energy efficiency" print-out in the lobby for all to see, what's it's current rating?

If you've got to monitor them now are you trying to establish a line in the sand over 12 months in which case you aren't saving merely monitoring surely?
I'm not having a dig you understand, it strikes me that for this level of monitoring kit, may cost you far more to buy, install & monitor than actively cutting down now based on figures that are out there as to your levels of consumption for say the past 5 years?

Whats in the purse to pay for this compared to say cutting one classrooms heating requirements down by say 1/3 ?

There are business kits out there but I guess whatever you look at has to get past a board of governors? How do you see the monitoring going & who would physically hold the reins via actively checking the monitors if no big computer program was available & cost effective, as grand scale usually costs! whereas plugging up holes is simple, & cheap with instantaneous results on consumption.
Ken B, Ted, Ivan, St B, & a few others will I'm sure be able to point you at a few large scale monitoring options, though in the main here it's all done on an individual basis.
Charging the earth might know of something also, bearing in mind his connections within university life, hang on & they'll appear, keep checking back.
 

[jfisher]

I enjoy the look at what we're doing so no offense taken. Basically I'm new at the school and so is my boss in the ICT department and we've just been asked to look into it as our budget gets slashed. I'm quite happy to look at one unit which gets hooked up to a distribution board for a given area of the school (our site manager has the whole lot mapped out where exactly the cables and power goes just not how much nor at what times.)

So it's possible to do this quite low tech with one data logging metre and moving it around to learn about data from one area at a time. But like every good system I want to have the idea in place for expansion and what the top end could be even if we can't implement it in one go.

Currently we have graphs showing the whole school power usage over a 24 hr period and a monthly day by day break down as well as yearly. But it doesn't show us where the wastage is.

[fred bloggs]

Jfisher

You could try looking at this company http://www.enistic.com/index.php (not  ) I've looked at a lot of systems over the last six months and they seem to be one of the cheaper systems that does what it says on the tin and they are designed ( I believe) in the UK!!!

I've just ordered a couple of systems from them for a client who wants to monitor a load of 3 phase distribution boards and show the results on a laptop in the office areas in an effort to make the staff take charge of their energy usage at work and hopefully reduce it, they are going to have a league with the different areas competing to reduce their energy usage, the lowest energy usage in an area after a set time (quarterly?) wins a prize. You could try something like that with the different areas of the school, just a thought.

Best Regards

Fred

[tz0c0s]

I did a lot of this in a previous job. The way we did it was with home grown kit & I have no details available. We built stuff up on S.T.E 19" racks & logged it over RS422 to a remote PC.

We used to count the KWh (E&OE don't shoot me please) pulses after de-bouncing the meter output. Totalise them & use an hourly poll to get history back to the PC.

I am sure there is good kit available these days. Have you got meters to connect to or will you need to use current transformers (CT'S).

I have Owl monitor, would 17 of these do? They have 3 inputs & come with a clip on CT. I take it the distribution boards are 3 phase, more complication.

HTH Andy.

[profp]

Use current clamps on the circuits you wish to monitor - this could be feed to a whole sub-distribution box or independent circuits within a given sub-distribution board. Less accurate at lower currents, but this is unlikely to be a concern for you.

Commercially manufactured units are available which use current clamps & radio telemetry to pass results back to a display - you may have seen a flyer from your domestic electricity co about these units, and they can be had cheaply on eBay and are generally around 30-40 quid new. CurrentCost ("OWL") [ http://currentcost.co.uk/ ] meters support three-phase, although you'll need to buy additional clamps.

The meters use a wireless link to the display which can be readily decoded - decoding is really easy and would make a good CDT / Design Tech project, or failing that you can buy a radio stick ready made for a rather pricy 55 quid from [ https://www.unitehomedevices.com/cgi-bin/uhd_shop.cgi?title=shop&mobile=0 ]. You can then log to a PC and/or possibly upload to google's power meter [ www.google.com/powermeter ]. Some versions of the currentcost (or alertme devices - but not sure about their three phase support) will upload to google direct without the need for any bodgination, but I'd imagine the longer term value of being able to manipulate the data locally (e.g. large displays of current consumption) might favour the homebrew route.

[Dyslexicbloke]

Hi,
Look I guess your budget isn't huge ... in fact I suspect you probably need to show some perceivable benefit before you even get a budget to work with.

You might want to consider some 'common sense' modifications before you invest in anything technical.
I am not saying technical isn't good but putting monitoring on all your individual circuits, assuming they are even suitably organised, isn't going to be cheep.

Take lighting for example ... Are your utility area lights on all the time, toilets and corridors for example, if so turn them off. You will need to slightly modify each circuit by adding a PIR or two but you can be sure that there is a saving to be made.

Energy monitoring is all well and good but it doesn't take a genius to walk a building and spot waste. You might even consider creating a project, with data collection being handled by your students, aimed at reducing your overall energy consumption.

Do you have an asset list detailing the 'standard' power consumption of all the equipment and fittings on the site and at what times each peace of equipment is likely to be in use.

My point is: You can do a great deal before you start investing in costly single circuit monitoring, most of which will be redundant once you apply
some common sense!!
I will be happy to expand on my points if you PM me

Alistair

[jfisher]

Just want to thank you all for the range of responses and Ideas will answer some of the points you've made to help give everyone a better picture.

Dyslexicbloke
Your absolutely right about the budget not being allocated unless I can show good reason. The site manager here is very good he has set all area lights on timer switches to motion sensors, so no movement for 15 minutes and the lights all go off etc, he has spent years here slowly making things as energy efficient as possible (including having solar panels at the school) but we know that over night when no one is here there is quite a large amount of power still being used.
i.e. the site manager doesn't think we can change much about our peak power usage but is sure that there is waste going on after hours. Also will pm you when I get some more information out of site in regards to what other energy saving things we have in place so that we not just going over old ground

Profp
Thank you for that, the site manager knows which distribution box feeds which area down to the individual circuits on the boards to which rooms, they are three phase so will need the extra clamps but will look into giving our DT man a shout and see what he can whip up for the decoder.

Fredbloggs
Thank your for the site am looking into it currently and that seems to be right up the alley for what is desired as the completed system, but I suspect due to budget that's going to be a ways down the road. But I can still show your idea to the higher ups and let them decide which route they want to take.

To everyone who's written in thank you, you've given me a lot of different ideas and scope to look at different prices of options (which makes it much easier to secure the budget cause I can wave some big numbers at them to make the more implementable ideas sound nice.)

[profp]

Thank you for that, the site manager knows which distribution box feeds which area down to the individual circuits on the boards to which rooms, they are three phase so will need the extra clamps but will look into giving our DT man a shout and see what he can whip up for the decoder.

Here is a post with details of the data format as it goes over the air - [ http://www.ukha-archive.com/ml/ukhad/2007-jan/msg00653.html ] , the 433Mhz radio modules are available ready-made from Farnell and Radio Spares for under a fiver.