The Bourne Measurement: Outsmarting Energy Loss With Check Meters

Ever read The Cuckoo’s Egg, the riveting true story of an astronomer-turned-systems manager who, in trying to reconcile his user account costs, stumbled onto a hacker attempting to access U.S. military bases via his laboratory network? What started off as a meticulous quest for 75 cents turned into a remarkable cyberchase involving spies, drugs, and the KGB.

A recent investigation of ours is just like that story. Well, almost. Our story doesn’t involve cocaine, the CIA, or German hackers selling secrets to our political enemies. But it does involve dogged pursuit of data discrepancies as well as missing cash! Quite a bit of $$$, in fact.

Every morning our systems engineers and billing analysts go through the data for the buildings on their respective accounts. The building in this story was recently constructed and had check meters installed in series upstream from submeters measuring load on multiple floors. The engineer assigned to this account noticed something odd. The main switchgear meters were reading ~16 kW higher than the total of their downstream submeters.

When the building team was contacted about the discrepancy, they explained that a floor was being built out for the first time, which explained why readings had gone up recently. But it didn’t explain why the submeters and the upstream check meter didn’t reconcile.

We communicated what we were seeing reading-wise with the onsite team. Upon investigation, they found that one of the submeters, which had been installed during construction but never had load before the build-out, had been wired incorrectly. Since the meter had never had load before (and hadn't been validated), its wiring issues went unidentified for years, until the build-out placed a load on the satellite disconnect and the problem was noticed by our eagle-eyed engineer (this win goes to senior systems engineer Erich Hesse).

As we’ve mentioned a time or two before, about 33% of all meters are installed incorrectly. And if you don’t have them validated, your billing data may be riddled with gaps that blast holes in your NOI.

That’s exactly what was going on at this property. Without the check meter (and our engineer’s diligence) to identify that more load was going out than was being captured, the property would potentially have lost out on recapturing that expense, amounting to $36,000 in annual revenue. Not a bad ROI on that $5K check meter.