Meter overview
What is a meter?
A meter tracks the use and cost of a specific resource (commodity) and is represented with a commodity icon.
It can represent a physical utility meter, and it can track any resource type, with or without an associated cost. Some non-traditional examples include using a meter to track the tons of waste removed from a facility and the cost (not use) of a sewer bill.
EnergyCAP API documentation may reference a meter as a data point, especially when working with interval data.
Deregulated scenarios have two accounts linked to one meter.
Meter facts
- Track consumption and cost of a utility service.
- Attach to accounts and sites. The meter must be attached to an active account before you can record billing data.
- Have a specific address and latitude and longitude (meters can inherit this from their parent site).
- Have bills associated with them even when no physical meter exists such as street lighting, refuse service, or a virtual chargeback meter.
- Can represent and chart interval data collected from a physical device or process.
- Can track and charge back use and cost information for monitored processes or facilities (submetered values).
- Can represent just a portion (percentage allocation) of a source bill that is divided for specific accounting purposes.
This system overview diagram shows how meters are linked to accounts and can then receive bills.
Types of meters
- Standard meters track information from an external utility vendor using imported bill data or manually entered data.
- Chargeback meters track use and cost information generated within the system.
- Linked meters (linked to Smart Analytics or Carbon Hub)
- Hidden meters (Utility Platform subscription)
- Aggregate meters (Utility Platform subscription)
Why attach a meter to a site and not an organization?
- Weather normalization works only at the site level (sites have weather stations).
- Budget worksheets include site-attached meters only.
- Energy Use Intensity (EUI) is accurate only when building area is available (not tracked at the organization level).
- Benchmarking calculations exclude organization-attached meters.
- Outlier audits skip bills from meters at the organization level.
- ENERGY STAR submissions require meters to be linked to a site.
- Reports (by building area) may miss organization-attached meters.
Meter account relationships
1 Meter : 1 Account
Simple utility bill with one account for each meter.
Multiple Meters : 1 Account
Summary bill where the vendor provides one bill with many meters.
1 Meter : 2 Accounts
Two vendors provide separate bills for the same meter. A deregulated meter has a supply vendor and a distribution vendor. The distribution vendor is often known as the "LDC" - the Local Distribution Company which owns the wires/pipes/poles and maintains and reads the meters.
Typically, both the supplier and distribution (LDC) vendor display the SAME use on bills.
It's common to track use on both bills, but you don't want to count it twice in rollups and reports, so the use on the supplier is set to informational only.
Manual bill entry messages
You can displays messages and add notes during manual bill entry to provide context or instructions.
- Account memo. Displays for all meters linked to an account. Add it by editing the account.
- Bill note. Add a note to any bill during manual entry or include it in a bill import file.
- Account alert. Displays if the bill's date range falls within the alert's effective period. Add it on the account's Properties page.
- Bill entry note. Displays during manual bill entry for a specific meter. Add it on the meter's Properties page.
Permissions
A report of user roles and their permissions is available for download on the Users and Roles page.
Custom user roles are created by administrators.