A 17-building university campus case study — electric, water, and BTU submetering strategy and meter selection, integration into a central utility management platform, consumption-based departmental billing allocation, data validation, and the capital decisions the data enabled.
The project brief: a state university campus with only two campus-wide utility meters and a disputed flat per-square-foot cost allocation formula needs building-level electric, water, and thermal (BTU) metering across 14 academic buildings and 3 residence halls — tiered by meter accuracy class and technology to the actual consequence and flow profile of each building, not applied identically campus-wide.
This module walks the whole rollout the way a real controls/energy engineer would: revenue-grade versus standard-accuracy meter selection reasoning, ultrasonic versus mechanical water meter selection by flow profile, the BTU meter's supply/return sensor-matching requirement, a weighted departmental billing allocation methodology with a parallel-run transition plan, a plant-level mass-balance data-validation technique that caught a real sensor drift, and the capital and behavioral decisions the resulting data justified. The full worked numbers, complete meter schedule, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.