The new feature floodgates have opened here at Wattics. In the last weeks, the development team has been hard at work creating new energy analytics features to help make the most of our energy management platform, here’s a few of them:
- Improve the efficiency and efficacy of your energy saving analysis;
- Get a deeper understanding of your facilities’ performance; and
- Add greater flexibility in the way that data, analyses and reports can be shared with clients and 3rd parties in a secure manner.
What’s more is that Wattics has launched its very own MQTT broker, signifying a growing number of sensors, meters and other building controls and applications from an diverse network of hardware providers being able to connect to the platform.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:
New integration: Wattics now compatible with MQTT
Wattics’ newly launched MQTT integration enables you to connect a vast array of MQTT-enabled devices monitoring for example, occupancy; air quality; electricity, water and gas consumption; temperature and so on. Due to its nature as a light-weight protocol suited to low powered, resource-constrained devices, MQTT is a popular choice for creating a robust IoT network in smart buildings, enabling devices to “talk” with one another. MQTT is an open protocol, allowing multiple devices from different manufacturers to communicate, avoiding vendor lock-in. This is advantageous especially when attempting to bring together various datasets to get a holistic overview of your facilities’ energy and environmental performance.
Learn more about how you can connect your MQTT devices to Wattics to integrate, visualise and analyse your monitoring data for your building energy management & sustainability projects.
New functionality: Data sharing with external organizations
The following new functionalities have been designed to give you, as a Wattics partner, greater flexibility around how you can share data with your customers/3rd parties, but at the same time maintain control over how data is accessed and by whom.
The new data sharing functionality tool in essence enables data sharing between Wattics partners and their external partners in a controlled, secure manner. There are several ways in which this tool can be beneficial, especially for energy service companies & consultants who require a means of sharing access to particular data necessary to deliver services, while still maintaining the integrity of the data and its ownership. Wattics partners can decide which organizations and sites are shared with external organisations, as well as the sharing permissions extended to end-users added to the platform by external organisations.
Use case example: Data sharing with external organisations
No.1 Hospitality Group (Wattics Partner) would like to add its client, XYZ Environmental Consultancy as an External Organisation for which to share monthly energy consumption and carbon emission reports with its boutique hotels in the city of Lyon, France. No.1 Hospitality Group (Wattics Partner) can grant XYZ Environmental Consultancy access to the data required to compile the reports and send them to the individual energy manager (end-user) of each hotel in Lyon. The data/analyses/reports shared with XYZ Environmental Consultancy, is decided upon and controlled by No.1 Hospitality Group.
For more information about the data sharing tool, including more practical use-cases, see this article.
New functionality: Local Administration
The new Local Adminstration tool allows Wattics partners to create custom user groups for which a local administrator can be assigned. Local administrators have the ability to add end-users to the Wattics platform and grant access to certain dashboard features and site information based on the access enabled by the Wattics Partner. This tiered level of access provides a host of benefits to scale, particularly for large companies managing multiple clients and projects simultaneously.
For more information about the Local Admin tool, including practical use-cases, see this article.
Updates to existing features:
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Numerical datapoints
Wattics has expanded the capabilities of its menu tree, now enabling numerical meters, for example, kWh/m2; m3/h; Heating Degree Days; Cooling Degree Days to be grouped under a meter of your choosing, for which you can view and analyse the cumulative or interval data for each individual numerical datapoint.
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Offset for meters
You can now implement an offset for meters in your dashboard. This can be done when creating a new datapoint in your Wattics energy dashboard.
In the example below, an offset has been set for a temperature meter/sensor, the readings for which are presented in celcius. In order to see temperature readings in Fahrenheit, an offset of “32” has been set to convert celsius reading to Fahrenheit in your Wattics dashboard. See screenshot below:
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Operations analyser:
Operations analyser working for groups
The Operations Analyser tool in your dashboard is now available for the groups created in your Wattics dashboard. With this update, you can view the performance of grouped appliances/equipment (HVAC), or floors/areas under a site/building, to get a better understanding of which assets in a group are consuming the most – in a ranking fashion. See screenshot below:
Furthermore, Wattics has implemented a new functionality for which creating a schedule to determine optimum operational hours for efficiency and savings can be set not only at site level (“Global”) but also at meter/appliance level (“Local”).
What does this mean?
You can now analyse patterns of power consumption, overnight activity and periods of high power activity for a whole building/site or an individual appliance based on the schedules set for the whole building/site including the meters/equipment under it (Global View), or check the performance of individual meters based on a specific schedule set for a single piece of equipment (Local View).
Operations analyser now working for organizations and virtual meters
In addition to the new functionalities above, the Operations Analyser has been made functional at organisational level as well as for virtual meters. Now you’re able to see and compare the performance of your sites under a particular organisation as well as for virtual meters. For example, applying the same schedule to a main incomer in a distribution board and all the machines that are connected to it.
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Portfolio Analyst:
Making groups public/private
The ‘Groups’ tool in your Wattics dashboard is of great help to aggregate data points of similar nature, to create shortcuts to have important information available to be recalled on demand and to have aggregated figures on data points that belong to different organisations or sites. Groups created in your dashboard can now be made private. This means that Wattics admin users can choose to make relevant groups available to their users and make private those that aren’t. This feature also decreases the possibility of data loss and unauthorised access to data.
KPI – allow for admin only or all users
Similarly to the Groups tool, access to the KPIs created in the Portfolio Analyst tool in your Wattics dashboard can now be made visible to only administrators or to all users.
New on the Wattics Knowledgebase:
The Portfolio Analyst is a particularly helpful if you have a sizable building portfolio, managing multiple sites/projects at the same time. You are able to consolidate all your incoming data whether information is arriving from meters, submeters, sensors, IoT, KPIs, environmental or business data. The Portfolio Analyst is a powerful way to keep a handle on the performance of your equipment or building/s, while the various automated analytical tools can simply run in the background doing the work for you. We’ve created a comprehensive guide to using the tool for your projects, which you can find below:
Wattics celebrates 10 years!
Last month, Wattics celebrated its 10th birthday! Coinciding with this milestone, is the company’s award as ‘Market Leader’ in energy management software, by FeaturedCustomers, the world’s leading customer reference platform for B2B business software & services. In addition to the recognition from FeaturedCustomers, Wattics received an additional award from EU Business News’ Irish Enterprise Awards for ‘Best Energy Management Solution’. More on Wattics milestones and 10 year milestone here.
In celebration of these awards and its 10 year anniversary, Wattics planted 100 trees, through its partner, ‘One Tree Planted’. This initiative forms part of the ethos of the company to give back to the natural world, and furthermore, contribute to the restoration and reforestation efforts in countries all around the world.
If this article is your first introduction to Wattics and you’d like to know more about the any of the abovementioned new releases or developments for your projects, book a free demonstration of these tools, using the form below:
