By reading your electric, gas and water meters first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, you can determine the quantity of electricity, water and fuel used overnight. High water use may be due to leaks. High electric use may be due to outside lighting, refrigeration, lights in vending machines and other controllable loads. High gas use may be due to warmer than necessary interior temperatures. Your clock thermostat may not be saving you as much money as it could.

Day to day activities

Field Inspection Check List

• Read meters morning and evening
• Keep records as you cannot properly monitor and control your consumption without recording energy use from day to day, month to month or year to year

Recommendations, advice and tips

• For all separate buildings, individual meters should be installed
• Metering and sub-metering of energy and resource use is a critical component of a comprehensive O&M program. Metering for O&M and energy efficiency refers to the measurement of quantities of energy delivered ; for example kilowatt-hours of electricity, cubic meters of natural gas, or cubic meters of water
• Install meters with data collecting and cost allocation software
• Simple whole-building metering coupled with cost-allocation and energy-use tracking can save the building owner/operator 4% of annual energy bills.
• Modern BEMS (Building Energy Management System) offer a range of connectivity options for both metering devices and data transfer. BEMS are found in larger buildings where technical installations have a level of complexity that requires intelligent control
• BEMS systems often have unused logging and logic capability which means that additional energy monitoring can be incorporated into existing infrastructure. Many solutions are available for connecting meters and extracting logged data. Furthermore, the BEMS provides access to control and condition information, which can be used in the analysis of energy consumption patterns