Energy Data Services
Data Acquisition
When you need a better picture of your current energy landscape, ZEA's Data Acquisition services can provide it. By deploying a wide variety of data logging sensors throughout your building, we can acquire the data to paint an extremely accurate and detailed picture of your energy landscape. You can then use this data to establish a baseline prior to an efficiency project, to drive usage reduction, to prioritize energy projects, to better calculate a project's ROI, etc.
Your energy and gas bills are a monthly total of all the energy used in your facility. ZEA can provide you with a weekly, daily, hourly or even by the minute total. This increase in data granularity can reveal previously unnoticed spikes in usage that indicate equipment is due for servicing, or that a process isn't working as efficiently as possible.
In addition to acquiring data more frequently than a monthly bill, Data Acquisition systems can also provide specific energy data for a particular piece of equipment, or a particular process. For example, ZEA can log the electrical usage of a commercial refrigerator, or an HVAC compressor or a bank of computer servers.
Examples of data that can be acquired include electric energy usage, gas usage, hot water usage, indoor and outdoor temperatures, duct pressures, occupancy CO2 levels, generated PV electricity and generated solar thermal hot water.
Data Monitoring
What to do with all this data that has been collected? Studies have shown that a substantial reduction in energy usage can be achieved simply by displaying current energy usage in real time. Why? Because when people see the direct results of their actions, they tend to modify their behavior accordingly. For example, seeing the energy increase in immediate kWH being used resulting from leaving on too many lights or the increase in therms/hr from opening windows while the heater is running will lead people to turn off the lights and either close the windows or turn off the heater when they need fresh air.
This is the benefit of Energy Monitoring. First ZEA deploys the data acquisition sensors. Then we install a monitoring system to display the acquired data. Monitoring systems can be either web-based and accessible from any web-enabled computer, or they can be a visual display such as a flat screen monitor or interactive touch screen display that is located in a publicly accessible area. The flexibility is virtually unlimited and ZEA will work with you to provide a customized monitoring solution that meets your particular needs.