The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. The organisation was looking for an energy management solution to easily monitor and control its energy consumption across their growing campus.
The challenge
An Energy Manager at the University of Reading explained that their process for handling energy data was clunky; using a Custom Excel report on an isolated building for particular dates and seasonal profiling to compare against previous weeks or years.
The system was unusual, with a main meter feeding the campus with hundreds of sub-meters structured underneath.
The goal was to streamline the process to save time and be more energy efficient, as part of the ISO 50001 accreditation.
The solution
Smart Spaces, a module in Energy Manager, the UK’s leading energy monitoring and targeting software, works by taking your AMR data, processing through the SystemsLink data collection service and feeding it into the Energy Manager software.
Organisations can configure bespoke thresholds per meter, creating an email alarm to end users and alert them to potentially wasteful use of energy.
The implementation of Smart Spaces has benefited the Energy Managers role significantly. The two sides of that are measuring savings from investment projects, which is verified using data downloaded from Energy Manager, and the day-to-day monitoring of energy which is done through batch validation and Smart Spaces.
The results
The Energy Manager software has helped underpin a wide range of projects and tasks for the University of Reading, including the organisation’s understanding and handling of energy.
The University’s Energy Manager said: “One of the fundamentals to ISO 500001 is continuous improvement. Smart Spaces has made it much easier. We don’t have to limit our priorities now. Everything that we want to look at we can, you just turn on the alarm. The prioritisation part is now just what alarms come into my inbox.”
Several people across the University have access to the system to provide meter readings or run reports. The Utilities Finance Administrator processes invoices within the system via EDI files and uses the batch validation function to monitor anomalies. Data from Energy Manager is also fed into a third-party package, pushing the data straight onto the university’s website which is all automatically linked and is publicly available.
The University of Reading website has an impressive map display that allows drilling down into individual site usage, including cost comparisons for energy consumptions.
As well as smoothing out processes, the Smart Spaces module has given the Energy Manager peace of mind that even if they aren’t interrogating the data constantly, the system is.
“We’re confident that we don’t have to be looking at something and still know that it is ticking along well, the alarms are there, and the system is checking it even if we’re not. It is both time-saving and has increased our scope.”
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