All of us have Utility Bills. Whether it be for our homes or our businesses, Utility Bills are a fact of life. Utility Bills to pay for electricity, water, gas, sewage, etc. The list goes on and on. You need to understand your energy consumption, and how that translates directly into dollars out of your pocket. Utility Scraping is a great way to understand all of these things. It makes up one part of a larger, essential whole.
Saving Money
All of us want to understand how we can save money on our Utility Bills. But, if we do not understand the data presented in the Utility Bills, how can we properly assess how to save money? Without data, and without understanding that data, we are shooting in the dark, so to speak, and have a very low chance of hitting the target we set out to hit. How do you understand this data?
Metering
We talk about metering a lot. We know. But it is something we cannot stress enough. Metering is absolutely essential to lowering your Utility Bills in a significant way, especially for a business. Knowing what kind of metering, where to install it, and what the heck it all means once it is working, are all essential. There is a myriad of reasons why metering leads to energy savings, and I hope to touch on some we have found to be the most significant.
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Behavior
Another important and not as well understand the way to save money on your Utilities. When are your lights on? How long are they on for? Do they need to be on that long? Why is that air handler kicking on in the middle of the night when it was not necessary to do so? Many more questions than these exist, and you won’t be able to discover the answer to them without metering. Data collected and displayed for your understanding is the best way to answer these questions, allowing you to train your people and equipment to work in the most efficient way possible.
Upgrading and Using New Technology
Many facilities throughout the world, at one point or another, bought the latest and greatest device the industry had to offer, to do whatever it is they needed to do. Be it a chiller, or a backup generator. Through the years and natural wear and tear, these latest and greatest devices become outdated. This can cause a rise in energy costs for several reasons: inefficient function, power quality issues, downtime, increased maintenance, and the list goes on. Knowing when to upgrade, and to what requires an intimate knowledge of your facilities profile and how the equipment within interacts with all parts of your facility. Just replacing something with the newest and greatest is rarely the best option. What if 2 of a smaller less expensive unit will do more efficient work for less money over the long term? What if the latest and greatest is HUGE overkill? You cannot know these things without understanding the data and the actual energy consumption.
Utility Bill Verification and Scraping
One of the primary ways metering will enable saving money on your Utility Bills. Sometimes there are discrepancies in what you actually consume for the billing period, and what they Utility billy you for. In these cases, having a Utility grade meter installed is an excellent way to clarify these discrepancies with the utility. It is absolutely essential to have the ability to protect yourself from the natural and human mistakes that crop up in our lives. You need to have the ability to compare real time data, with the data provided by your Utility Company. This can be done many ways, we prefer to do it by “scraping” the data and using it in custom graphs that easily display the comparisons for you. “Scraping” is simply a term to describe the process of taking data from a bill or another online document and accurately representing it in another location. Like we always say, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And compare!