There is an old saying that appears in almost all books on management: There is no management without measurement. This rule is crucial in energy management. When information (energy data) is accurate, readily available and reliable, good decisions are much easier to make. Though manual readings are often incomplete and unreliable, many companies still depend on them, even if millions of CZK worth of investments are at stake. Automatic, precise reading of energy meters brings the question of energy management, energy consumption and expenses to a whole new level. You are able to detect wasting even outside of your working hours, you get alerts about breakdowns and defects, you can verify if the invoices issued by the provider of energy is correct or you can, in great detail, monitor the impact of newly installed saving solutions.
One thing that is frequently mentioned in connection to this topic is the price of automatic reading. Some time ago, we inspected a compound of administrative buildings with the overall number of 140 energy meters, all of them read manually. It takes two days for the technician to make the round; if he earns in average 300 CZK an hour and one work day is 7.5 hours, the reading costs 4.500 CZK/month, i.e. 54.000 CZK/year. For this price, the building administrator gets a service which still, however, enables tenants to complain about undetected leaking of heat and incorrect invoicing, and which does not provide the administration of the building with data necessary for improvement of energy efficiency. The investment in automatic reading was assessed as worth of 220.000 CZK, including a six-year guarantee period. The payback period is, from a purely financial point of view, 4 years, not to mention the comfort that remote reading brings. This is food for thought.