Link buildings and meters

After you have shared your properties from Portfolio Manager to UtilityManagement you are ready to link your buildings and meters. 

Link buildings 

From the root of your Buildings and Meters tree you can view linked and unlinked buildings on the ENERGY STAR tab.

Click Link building and select the matching Portfolio Manager property.

Submit individual meters or by commodity

After you link your building, select your submission method.

You can map each utility meter to a Portfolio Manager meter or you can aggregate your meters by commodity.

If you change your submission method from individual meters to meters by commodity you may want to use a new Portfolio Manager meter to prevent overlapping data and errors.

Remember if a meter doesn't exist in Portfolio Manager, UtilityManagement can create it for you.

When you submit by commodity you are aggregating all the meters for the building, for example, all the electric meters, and submitting to one Portfolio Manager electric meter. This option can help you quickly configure a building with many meters.

The option to submit Meters by commodity is not available with setup spreadsheets.

Link meters

Only active meters in UtilityManagement can be linked to Portfolio Manager meters.

  • If an UtilityManagement meter becomes inactive, it loses its link to the Portfolio Manager meter.
  • If an UtilityManagement meter is moved to another building, it loses its link to the Portfolio Manager meter.

Check the UtilityManagement meter you want to submit to Portfolio Manager, choose the matching meter in Portfolio Manager, or create the meter in Portfolio Manager.

Unlink options

You can unlink a meter, building, or your Portfolio Manager account.

  1. Unlink a meter at any time by unchecking the meter in the Building ENERGY STAR Configuration panel.

     
  2. Unlink a building at any time from the building's ENERGY STAR tab using the More Actions menu.


     
  3. Remove your Portfolio Manager connection in the Buildings and Meters module menu under ENERGY STAR->Settings.

Link buildings and meters with a spreadsheet

The ENERGY STAR Mappings Update Spreadsheet lets you see what is and is not linked to ENERGY STAR.

To fix an incorrectly linked meter

  1. Unlink the meter.
  2. Save the spreadsheet and upload.
  3. Download a new spreadsheet.
  4. Link the meter.

Select the Portfolio Manager property

The spreadsheet lists each UtilityManagement building by Place Code and Place Name, to link or unlink to a Portfolio Manager Property choose your option from the drop-down.

Select the Portfolio Manager meter

After you map an UtilityManagement building to a Portfolio manager property you can map meters.

Automatically create meters in Portfolio Manager

While linking your meters you can decide to have UtilityManagement create the meter for you. All Portfolio Manager supported commodities can be automatically created except coal and influent flow.

The default commodity for automatically created meters is listed in Supported Commodities. It's important to review the default list when using the Create in Portfolio Manager option.

You cannot automatically create meters with a spreadsheet.

Create energy meters in Portfolio Manager

For UtilityManagement to submit use data to ENERGY STAR, you must use the correct units on meters in Portfolio Manager. 

Any existing PM meters must match the units specified in the supported commodities table (shown below). UtilityManagement automatically converts the usage from your UtilityManagement bills to the units of the PM meters.

You can see the list of supported commodities and the corresponding units in the application. From the Buildings and Meters module menu choose Supported Commodities.

Supported Commodities.

At this time solar data is not submitted to ENERGY STAR because Portfolio Manager expects additional pieces of information for each bill. It's recommended these meters and their bills be managed directly in Portfolio Manager.

How to update a Portfolio Manager meter's use units

If you update the unit of measure in Portfolio Manager the bill history is not converted to the new unit. Portfolio Manager displays the new unit, but doesn't convert the use.

Three options exist for updating the Portfolio Manager meter to the correct unit, choose one of the following:

  • Set up a new Portfolio Manager meter with the correct use units. Make the effective date the earliest UtilityManagement submission date. Make the old meter inactive on the same date.
  • Convert or correct the use on all the historical bills.
  • If you prefer to keep the unit on your Portfolio Manager meter,  you can request the mapping unit in UtilityManagement be updated to the existing Portfolio Manager meter unit. Submit a ticket to Tech Support for this change.