Energy monitoring and billing in Smart Buildings

 

About energy monitoring and billing

Whether you are a building owner or the company responsible for its maintenance, you know that energy management is key to optimizing the perfomance and reducing costs by 30%.

In case that this building or industrial warehouse is shared between companies who rent a coworking space, the importance of monitoring the costs related to energy consumption become a crucial factor.

In this case study we will detail and analyze the best project performed by our partner BaitiKW. Energy monitoring and billing of 580 spaces, offices, stores and shops located in Al Tijaria, Al Shorouq, Al Bodour and Symphony Style towers / buildings; all in Kuwait City.

 

 

Needs and goals

The project required an energy managament solution in order to cross charge tenants for energy usage of the spaces and offices rented in Al Tijaria, Al Shorouq, Al Bodour and Symphony Style towers / buildings and their respective shopping centers..

Given the majestic dimensions of the towers, a complete wireless monitoring was required. Below we detail the project needs and objectives:

• Energy monitoring of 580 spaces, offices and stores distributed among the towers and buildings
• Long range wireless communication between the gateway and the energy meters
• Energy consumption monetization based on Kuwait electricity tariff
• Automatic monthly generation and mailing of the electricity bill to the tenants of the spaces, offices and shops
• Project maintenance via cloud, including the electricity contracts, the energy meters data validation and the wireless communications

 

Solution

For this project, BaitiKW and Circutor planned the use of Modbus energy meters combined with Modbus to LoRa converters in order to create wireless monitoring networks. Bridge LR, the Modbus to LoRa converter, can be configured as Master (wired to the Modbus Master) or as Slave (wired to the Modbus slave). This feature allowed us to only use one device to deply the LoRa private network.

Each Bridge LR in Master mode is connected to one PICK 3G, the device that recollects, stores and sends the data to DataBox cloud platform, where data validation and invoice reports generation are executed.

As a summary, the devices installed for the project are the following:

Bridge LR was the most important piece of the project because it converted 580 Modbus energy meters into wireless devices. Thanks to LoRa communications usage, the installation and cabling costs were reduced by 80% and made possible the monitoring of 580 spaces with just 16 LoRa wireless subnetworks.

Depending on the subnetwork, between 15 and 100 energy meters data are collected each hour. All without any single cable between the gateway and the meters.

The devices schema of each gateway installed on the Al-Tijaria project is displayed below:

 

 

Once the electric consumption data is sent to the platform, each value is processed and monetized based on the electricity contract of each tenant.

Finally, the logo of each customer is added to the billing reports which are sent by mail to each tenant in order to offer a complete customized service.

Results

Kuwait City towers energy monitoring, with the emblematic Al Tijaria as flagship, is a project deployed between July and September 2019. Circutor's wireless monitoring solution enabled a fast, accurate and solid comissioning.

Nowadays, DataBox anually generates 7.000 electricity bills simulations in order to split, with maximum detail, the energy consumption costs of each space of these four buildings.

One outstanding reference project of monitoring, data collection and energy billing generation which automatically manages 580 offices, stores and locals.

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