The customer
Coventry University has over 27,000 students and occupies a purpose-built 33-acre campus in the heart of Coventry city centre. The University is dedicated to providing a high quality, safe and healthy campus, with high standards of environmental responsibility.
The challenge
The University campus previously had a central boiler house providing heating, cooling and hot water to the building complex. Consumption and costs were high with no clear understanding of metrics of where the energy was consumed.
Coventry University’s aim was to install a complete metering system which would allow them to monitor energy consumption on heating and cooling systems across the campus and provide cost centre apportionment, energy management, and automatic monitoring and targeting (aM&T) in compliance with government guidelines for energy conservation.
The solution
The University Estate Services team chose Switch2 for the project delivery based on our experience and our ability to design, supply, install and commission the complete solution.
The first phase consisted of the supply, installation and commissioning of 25 Landis & Gyr Ultraheat energy meters connected to an M-Bus automatic meter reading system (AMR). By using the internal telephone system and a modem, all individual meters are connected back to the energy office.
This enables the consumer to be monitored by the Energy Manager, on-demand. The metering solution is flexible and can be expanded as and when new buildings are added.
The outcome
The success of this project has enabled Switch2 to work with the University on an ongoing expansion project over the next five years. Additional phases to the monitoring system have allowed it to expand with the inclusion of electric, gas and water meters. This way the overall utility consumption of the campus can be monitored allowing for action to be taken for consumption optimisation.
In 2009 Switch2 was able to upgrade the system by switching from internal telephone lines over to the University’s Ethernet LAN. The interfaces and modems have been replaced with TCP/IP addressable interfaces. This TCP/IP connectivity allows for faster access and a more stable network and it also enables the data gathered from the meter readings to be handled in a more efficient and manageable way. This is achieved through the direct transfer of data between the AMR system and the aM&T software.
Switch2 has provided a complete solution to meet the demands of the University where individual metering of buildings on the widespread estate was required. As a result, essential utility data is supplied in a timely and cost-effective manner with the meter readings being integrated into a proprietary energy management software package.
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