With a large percentage of the global workforce still working remotely, and less time spent in indoor spaces outside of our homes, it has become increasingly important to reduce the costs associated with antiquated and resource-intensive facilities in buildings that have largely been left to stand empty in the past months.
Companies delivering energy analytics services find themselves in a position where they need to adapt to the changing needs and priorities of their commercial & industrial clients, more specifically, balancing the need for increased resource efficiency and reduced cost, while also preparing their facilities for occupant re-entry – the focus being indoor health and well-being.
To do this service providers require the tools to thoroughly analyse the consumption behaviours in the buildings they manage, as well as to measure, verify and track the performance of new technologies.
Furthermore, in a time when client interaction is largely virtual and access to physical sites/buildings is restricted, energy professionals have become more reliant on technology, equipped with the tools they need for energy monitoring, data visualization, and communication for their projects without needing to be onsite or in the same location as their customers.
The article below describes the newly released Wattics features in response to the requirements of energy professionals, service providers & consultats as they seek to address the evolving needs of industrial and commercial business and real estate owners & managers.
Let’s take a look ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️
Geo-location maps:
Wattics has introduced a new geolocation map embedded in its analytics dashboard that enables you to visualise your data on an interactive world map as seen in the image below:
Zoomed in view:
This new map visualisation allows you to quickly reference your building/site data on the world map. If you have projects encompassing multiple building or sites on the map, you can filter buildings and/or sites by location, data type eg. electricity, water and gas, the related cost information as well as the time period for your analysis. See example below:
To find the consumption, cost and other information for a particular building or site, click its location tag on the map. A direct link takes you to the building/site information and analysis in the Wattics dashboard.
Building information and satellite map view:
What makes the geo-location tool particularly useful is the ability for energy auditors to gather information about a building or site’s surroundings eg. gathering preliminary information for your energy projects – for example, the potential installation of solar panels. Using the ‘zoom’ and ‘street view’ functions of the map tool makes it easy to see if there is sufficient surface area for panel installation, the position of building i.e. north/south facing, exposure to sunlight, roof angle, whether there are any potential physical obstructions and shading, etc.
[If you would like a demo on the Maps feature or would like to have it enabled in your Wattics dashboard, please contact [email protected]]
Utility Bill Management & Analytics
The Utility Bill Management & Analytics tool allows you to organize and manage multiple bills and provides an interface to read their values. This tool is particularly useful to verify utility bills from your utility/energy supplier, to better understand the charges contained in your bills. Furthermore, it provides the means to digitalise your utility bills, to track, analyse and report on energy consumption and costs and other metrics for your efficiency projects.
The utility bill tool is two-fold.
- The tool enables the import of utility bills in PDF format to the Wattics dashboard. Using the utility bill as a guide, you can create a template for the import of cost values associated with kW demand, kWh consumption, CO2 emissions, account information and other monthly charges on your utility bill in the Wattics dashboard.
Setting up of utility bill template
Why is this template important? This template provides a standard format to guide the person(s) responsible for inputting the utility bill values in the Wattics dashboard.
- Once your utility bill template(s) have been created, you can begin to import your utility bill data. This data will be visible as data points in your Wattics dashboard for monitoring, analysis & reporting.
Mapping of utility bill data in the creation of utility bill template
[Check this detailed guide on the Utility Bill tool ]
Bulk Analytics: Reintroducing the Portfolio Analyst & Favourite Dashboards
Portfolio Analyst
The Portfolio Analyst is the go-to data management tool to organise your data to scale your analyses for large building portfolios. With this multifaceted tool, you can:
- Synchronise your building, meter, sensor, IoT, KPI, environmental & business data from different sources into a unified view
- Import KPIs in bulk to analyse and compare performance across multiple sites, areas, business operations in varied locations against savings goals and milestones.
- Create consumption thresholds (daily, hourly) for building facilities and operations eg. HVAC, lighting etc to monitor and track events.
- Group your meters, sites, organizations using new tagging feature improve the search visibility of monitored points for analysis in the Wattics dashboard.
- Achieve scale in performance benchmarking for buildings, green building certification, compliances, energy efficiency & retrofit projects
Favourite Dashboards
Favourite Dashboards is a visualisation tool feature enabling you to ‘bookmark’ selected analyses & graphs for quick reference and reporting. If managing projects for multiple buildings and sites, you can select the graphs and charts you would like to see in one, unified view. This tool is particularly useful if you want to tailor a customer’s dashboard including only the most relevant analyses for a specific project or selection of projects. This tool provides the flexibility and customisation required when making access to certain analyses available to customers, team members or where necessary, parties outside your organisation via a secure link.
Favourite Dashboard view example:
[Check this detailed guide on the Favourite Dashboards tool ]
The following video also provides a brief introduction to the Portfolio Analyst and Favourite Dashboards tools:
Consumption trend “Sentinel” report
Wattics has introduced a new report to consolidate all the anomalies detected related to your monitored buildings/sites and equipment or appliances within a specified reporting period. It provides a summary of irregularities that happened during a chosen period eg. 01/01/19 – 01/02/19. See report sample below:
[Check this detailed guide on the Sentinel Report tool]
Operations Analyser scheduling tool
The operations analyser enables you to understand usage and wastage of resources (energy, water, gas, etc) – through a heat map, showing energy intensity of an appliance or piece of equipment. It is possible to simulate turning off devices for a period of time in the day or replacing machines, lights or appliances for more efficient ones – resulting in a new operating schedule revealing the savings potential if a desired action or technology is implemented.
See example below:
Check this overview video of the Operations Analyser tool –> How the Operations Analyser works
A new addition to the operations analyser is the ability to save this schedule at site level, meaning that the newly saved schedule will be applied to all the meters under the site. Once the schedule is applied, the Operations Analyser generates a chart of the monitored equipment or appliances demonstrating the savings potential of each asset if the simulated were to be implemented. See image below:
[Check this detailed guide on the Operation Analyser Scheduling tool]
Wait…there’s more!
[If you would like to see the features below in more detail or would like to have it enabled in your Wattics dashboard, please contact [email protected]]
- Calculating CO2 for electricity & gas: Through the Wattics tariff analyser tool, you can input CO2 conversion factors for electricity and gas consumption – enabling the calculation of CO2 emissions based on the conversion factor eg. 0.82. The CO2 calculation will be available in the Breakdown for further analysis.
- Editing Formula Meters in bulk: You can now edit Formula Meters in bulk – this functionality is extremely useful when working with a large number of Formula data points, which share a part or parts of the same formula. To be able to handle the editing of a large number of Formulas, a tool was created to allow the user to edit a portion of a formula and apply this change to all formula meters which contain the same part or parts of the formula being edited. This refers to a specific use case and a special syntax was developed to allow the easy manipulation of formulas in bulk.
- Formula Meters sub-meter level: Since the launch of the Formula Meters, users of the Wattics platform have enhanced the way they keep track of KPIs and find correlations between datasets. In addition to the Formula Meters, you can create right now, a new option to add them to appliance level (level 4) has been created. This should enable more flexibility in terms of where the Formula Meters can be situated on the menu tree.
- Utility Bill export: The new utility bill export feature enables you to export calculations contained in your utility bill report (see image below) – which can be used in other analyses on the Wattics dashboard. eg. bulk analysis of monitored points with specific cost figures.
Example of calculations that can be exported from your utility bills.
- Remarks: This feature builds on the communication tools in the Wattics dashboard. In addition to the notes feature, which enables the creation & sharing of notes and comments about data patterns and other events associated with sites, meters, and other data with team/project members or owners. You can now use the ‘Remarks’ feature to highlight an event, irregularity, consumption spike and other trends or patterns in a specific date range. This will appear on the analysis itself – see example below. You can make remarks visible to administrators on the platform only. You can also hide remarks if demonstrating dashboard features and functionalities to clients.
Remark Example:
Integration with leading hardware providers:
Wattics has been expanding and growing its integration capabilities with some of the leading providers of smart metering, IoT and intelligent building technologies & 3rd party platforms to enable you to go much further than simple monitoring and surface-level analysis of your building, business and environmental data. New integrations with the Wattics platform include Wattsense, Panoramic Power, Shelley (Allterco) and ABB. More information on these integrations to follow in January 2021. Watch this space!
Did you know? Wattics is integrated with Smappee (Belgium), Wattwatchers (Australia) and Arc Skoru – the Green Building Certification Institute’s (GBCI) sustainability scoring platform for green buildings. To know more about these integrations, click on the links below:
- Smappee: Integrate your Smappee device with Wattics energy management software
- Wattwatchers: 5 step guide to install and connect your Wattwatchers device to Wattics energy management software
- Arc Skoru: Step by step guide: How to connect your Wattics energy management dashboard to Arc green building platform
To see how these analytics features can help you better manage and analyse your projects for savings, book a free demonstration of these tools, using the form below:
