Articles reproduced from SMEasure

To accurately monitor your energy and water consumption, it is essential to know where all your meters are, what each one is and how to read them. This can often be difficult at first, but once this is established monitoring is a simple procedure.

Locating your meters

The best advice on accurately locating your meters is simply to explore, as they are generally located within the business property. Electricity and gas meters are often in an equipment room (in the dark depths of a basement or cupboard) so do look around to find out where everything is. Some properties, particularly older buildings, contain several meters, some of which may no longer be active. To verify you have the correct meters, cross reference your findings with your bills. There should be a meter serial number on both the bill and the meter and these should match and tell you if there are any meters that are not active or you have not found.

Water meters can often be more difficult to locate, and are generally outside the property in a box or under the pavement, if your property is metered at all! Access to these is often restricted, so you will need to talk to your utility company in order to gain this. Again, this is often difficult initially, but once you have access it is easy to monitor.

How do I read my gas meter?

This is our cheat sheet for helping you to learn how to correctly read your gas meter. It can sometimes be a bit confusing at first, but hopefully these example illustrations of gas meters & their readings
will help you know how to read your meter straight off the bat. Before getting started, make sure someone has clear responsibility for reading meters (and knows who else can do it if they are ill or on holiday) and is familiar with the meters, units, recording conventions and can log data into SMEasure.

Two Important things to be conscious of when reading your gas meter:

1. The measurement unit of your gas meter - this should be written actually on the meter. In the UK gas meters are typically in cubic feet (ft3) or meters (m3).When creating a gas meter in your SMEasure profile you will need to indicate the unit – if you don't know when creating the meter edit it once you have looked at the meter.
2. Decimal places - some gas meters will have readings to between one and three decimal places. Typically, the decimal places will be in a smaller font to the primary digits or will have a different coloured background. The decimal point is also often marked, but can sometimes be hard to see. In SMEasure you can record your meter reading to several decimal places. If you do want this level of precision in your reading entries do remember to actually type the decimal point.

Example Gas Meters

Example 1: Meter in m3 with decimal point option.

The reading for SMEasure is:
(i) with no decimal point: 16151 m3
OR
(ii) with 2 decimal points: 16151.94 m3

Example 2: Meter in ft3 with no decimal option.

The reading for SMEasure is with no decimal point:
7316 ft3

How do I read my electricity meter?

Before you start, make sure someone has clear responsibility for this (and knows who else can do it if they are ill or on holiday) and is familiar with the meters, units, recording conventions and can log data into SMEasure.

Electricity meters are usually fairly straightforward to read, but like the gas meters there are some things to watch out for. In the UK most electricity readings will be in kWh units so this makes setting up your electricity meter(s) in SMEasure relatively simple.

Electricity meters typically take one of 2 forms:

1. A series of number dials
2. A digital display – smart meters will be in this format. The digital displays can sometimes flash a series of different information such as the date, off-peak, on-peak, power demand (kVa) etc. You may have to push a button to click through the different information options. If your meter has this feature you want to make sure you are taking down the number that represents the power consumption.

Like gas meters, electricity meters can sometimes display the reading to several decimal places – it should be apparent by looking at the meter if this is the case. However, if you are a large energy user then it maybe those small numbers are actually meaning your meter reading should be multiplied by 100 (& not decimal points) - to multiply your reading by 100 simply add a couple of zeros to your meter readings & SMEasure will take care of the rest! You'll be able to tell if this is the case within a couple of weeks because your electricity consumption will be too low given the size and activities of your building.

If you have a Smart Meter giving half-hourly readings then there should be a button on your meter and you will need to click through the display options and one of these will be the actual meter reading. Because SMEasure is based on presenting results for weekly energy use and does not capture half-hourly data we cannot give you feedback or plot daily consumption patterns at this time. However, we are thinking about ways to integrate smart meter data into SMEasure building profiles.

Example Electricity Meters

Example 1: Meter in m3 with decimal point option.

The reading for SMEasure is:
(i) with no decimal point: 16151 m3,
OR
(ii) with 2 decimal points: 16151.94 m3

Example 2: Meter in ft3 with no decimal option.

The reading for SMEasure is with no decimal point:
7316 ft3

Things to check

It is always worth making simple checks on your readings when you input the data into SMEasure. Some questions that the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers suggests you ask yourself:

• How do the data compare with previous readings?
• Is the number of digits correct, and the decimal in the same place?
• Do the figures fall within acceptance bands?
• Are the correct units used?
• Do meter readings reconcile with invoices?
• Are invoices estimated?