Commercial Use

Businesses with tenants can benefit using the two basic models described in the Residential section. Businesses also can benefit from demand abatement and equipment monitoring. They often are penalized when they use too much at any one time. Planned "peak shaving" can avoid paying much higher rates. By monitoring branch circuits to reduce demand concurrency, your bill can be cut in half! Perform quick analyses at any time!

By detecting impending failures, costly repairs and downtime can be averted. This is not expensive or difficult to do with microMeter. One little processor can watch a dozen big machines 24/7. Some of the best locations have been grocery stores. By providing a better handle on energy use, metering and monitoring equipment can open up a whole new world in the realm of energy management. Start saving money today!

Things found over the years

Renovation and Turnaround - Individually Metered Spaces - Real Estate Flipping

This is unquestionably the best improvement you can make for a resale profit. It is cheaper than paint. It allows you, without any rewiring, to sell a building with individually metered spaces. This very quick improvement can upgrade the use of a structure for a profitable resale while avoiding the appearance of (and possible consequences of) "real estate flipping". It is much easier to rent out subdivided spaces that to find one anchor tenant. It becomes much easier to move unsold property.

Supermarket / Convenience Store

This market is saturated and becoming increasingly competitive. Store size, age, and location vary, but estimates indicate an annual electricity use of approximately 100 kWh per square ft. Utility costs for such use range from $8.75-$12 per square ft and represent about 14% of a store's direct operating costs. This cost could be reduced by more-efficient energy use through energy management. Overall, an estimated 25% reduction in utility costs could be achieved, improving a store's typical return on investment by about 10%. (EPRI)

These businesses rely heavily on refrigeration. The concerns here are not only saving energy, but protecting perishable inventory and expensive equipment. When unusual demands and usages occur, the event is logged and annunciated.

Office Highrise Roof Chillers Return on Investment > 1000%

A sixteen story building had a monthly power bill in excess of $25000. During an energy audit, a single processor was used to monitor the 16 identical air conditioning units that served each floor. The resulting data was normalized for running time and showed that the best unit consumed 4% of the total power used for air conditioning. The average was 6.25% and the worst unit consumed over 10%! bar-chart A huge nest was discovered inside the ductwork! New buildings benefit from the start! Camelot Ctr.

Communications Rack Monitor

Recently a major E-commerce enterprise suffered a four day outage that cost more than $75,000 of potential commission and sales. A new server was added that overloaded a circuit when it was first turned on. Four active servers lost power because the breaker was located in the outlet strip and the UPS was upstream of that. Recovery was complicated by fact that disk writes were taking place at the time on at least three of the servers. A load monitoring system based on a mM could have prevented the problem by showing the connected load profile of each and every device connected to the strips. This is cheap insurance!

In September '04, Carlos sent in a realtime display for his server farm. He developed the graph and interfaced it with mM. His business is growing and plans to monitor more circuits as they are added. more

Gaming Establishments

This equipment is the cheapest way to create hundreds of individually metered "establishments" on one physical property for the legal purpose of operating electronic gaming machines.

Energy Retrofit/Audit

Businesses that provide energy management consulting can establish a baseline and demonstrate the savings. For example, an office complex used a processor to record a day-by-day demand profile during an energy conservation retrofit. The equipment was placed onsite for two weeks by a lighting contractor to validate the predicted improvements brought about by replacing lamp fixtures and ballasts. All parties were pleased with the proven results.

Golf Carts

Golf carts use about 15 kwh (costing a dollar or so) to charge completely. If a dozen carts are always being charged, this will amount to about $500 per month. A microMETER can easily allocate these costs per charge.