Sub-metering
Sub-metering tracks individual energy use in multi-tenant buildings, ensuring accurate billing and promoting energy efficiency. By billing based on actual consumption, it increases accountability and reduces disputes. Lansen provides tools for monitoring electricity, water, and gas, offering cost-effective and secure solutions for efficient energy management. Learn more about sub-metering here!
Sub-Metering: Enhancing Energy Management and Accountability
Sub-metering is an innovative approach to tracking and managing energy consumption in multi-tenant buildings, commercial properties, or large residential complexes. It involves installing individual meters to measure the energy usage of specific units, tenants, or even equipment. This method allows for greater transparency and accountability, ensuring that each occupant or department is billed based on actual consumption.
What is Sub-Metering?
Sub-metering refers to the process of measuring the utility usage—such as electricity, water, gas, or heat—of individual units or spaces within a building, separately from the main meter. While the main meter tracks overall consumption, sub-meters break down this data to provide detailed information for specific areas or users.
How Sub-Metering Works
In a sub-metering system, individual meters are installed for each unit or tenant in a building. These meters monitor the consumption of electricity, water, gas, or other utilities, providing real-time data on usage. This information is then collected and used to generate bills that reflect each tenant's actual consumption, rather than dividing the total utility cost evenly among occupants.
Key Benefits of Sub-Metering
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Accurate Billing
One of the biggest advantages of sub-metering is that it allows for accurate billing based on individual consumption. Rather than distributing utility costs equally or using estimates, sub-metering ensures that each tenant or unit is responsible for their own usage. This leads to fair and transparent billing practices. -
Energy Efficiency
When people are aware of their actual energy consumption, they are more likely to adopt energy-saving habits. Sub-metering provides real-time feedback that encourages tenants to reduce their energy use, helping both them and the building owner save on utility costs.
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Improved Accountability
Sub-metering holds each tenant accountable for their own consumption. It eliminates disputes over shared utility bills and creates an incentive for occupants to monitor and control their usage more effectively. This can be particularly beneficial in commercial buildings, where different departments or businesses may have vastly different energy needs. -
Enhanced Property Value
Buildings equipped with sub-metering systems are often more attractive to potential tenants or buyers. The ability to monitor and control individual utility usage is seen as a modern, efficient feature that can increase the property's overall value.
Types of Sub-Metering Systems
Electric Sub-Metering
Electric sub-metering tracks the electricity usage of individual units or equipment. This is particularly useful in apartment complexes, office buildings, and industrial facilities where different tenants or departments have varying energy needs.
Water Sub-Metering
Water sub-metering measures the water consumption of individual units or areas within a building. It is widely used in residential buildings to ensure that tenants are billed fairly based on their actual water use.
Gas Sub-Metering
Gas sub-metering is essential for buildings that use natural gas for heating, cooking, or other purposes. It allows property managers to track gas usage and ensure that each tenant pays for their actual consumption.
Sub-Metering for Sustainable Energy Management
In addition to promoting fairness and accountability, sub-metering plays a key role in sustainable energy management. By providing detailed data on usage patterns, sub-metering systems help property owners identify inefficiencies and make improvements to reduce overall consumption. This can lead to significant cost savings and a smaller environmental footprint.
Sub-metering is a powerful tool for managing utility usage and enhancing transparency in multi-tenant buildings. By providing accurate billing, promoting energy efficiency, and improving accountability, sub-metering helps both property owners and tenants gain better control over their energy consumption. Whether it's electricity, water, or gas, sub-metering systems offer a fair and sustainable way to manage resources in any property.
Enhance your data collection for sub-metering with Lansen
We offer multiple solutions suitable for sub-metering:
Use the temperature probe transmitter to measure temperature on water-, or heating pipes. You can connect up to four external temperature probes to the device, making it a suitable tool for operational control of temperature.
To monitor devices such as pumps, electricity meters, and water meters, Lansen offer a variety of pulse counters for both indoor and outdoor use. The devices are available for harsh weather conditions, as well as drive-by versions.
Another way of monitoring pumps, but also relays to a motor or reed switches to a valve, is to install our dry contacts.
To effectively gather and transmit data to the cloud, our repeaters and gateways are a good solution. Both devices can be battery-driven and, thanks to their internal clocks being synchronized, the devices can be activated at the same time. This maximizes the devices battery life, ensuring a long battery-life of 10+ years. The fact that the devices can be battery-driven also means an easy installation without the need to hire an electrician.
This solution provides a dual benefit: it is both cost-efficient and secure. Its cost-effectiveness stems from the reduced need for additional gateways, while security is maintained through encrypted data transmissions to the cloud.
Furthermore, repeaters present a more economical alternative compared to adding more gateways. Since our products follow the OMS standard they are compatible with all variants of Wireless M-Bus (C, T, and S modes), which means that they can be integrated into any M-Bus metering infrastructure.