The Datta Meghe Institute of Higher Education & Research is a deemed university located in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, hosting multiple colleges, institutions & departments. With several outstation students, there are multiple student hostels being run to cater to these students.
Traditionally energy usage and costs have been unchecked, where variable and specific consumption remained untraced, leading to demonstrated scenarios of wastage and abusive consumption. The current milieu limits organizations to depend on the typical blackbox scenario, where the utility meter is the only source of energy consumption information, and deciphering usage proportional to usage (disaggregation) remains the challenge.
SustLabs’ Ohm Assistant helps in factoring electricity expenses for EBITDA management and building strategic insights while preparing the case for hotel acquisitions. Thus no more unpredictability or uncertainty around electricity bills. Accurate assessment of electricity costs while building acquisition plans or modelling business plans.
Specifically, the hostel management is looking to identify and then recover energy charges from the end users, keeping this in line to actual usage. Currently this is limited due to the inability to determine segregation based on actual use. The implementation of a solution including multiple devices as submeters at the room level, along with the system admin panel so that the consolidated view of the consumption is one that would address this need.
SustLabs offers a unique billing solution permitting room wise tracking of energy consumption, and hence this has been pivotal in implementation of processes for billing & passing on these expenses to the specific room occupants.
The system supports multiple rooms across multiple hostels. The core system is based on an administrator panel which can be accessed & updated by the administrator. Subusers can also be created, with custom controls for local management by the admin also provisioned.
LOG IN SCREEN
HOME SCREEN
- List of all the Rooms (Meters) is displayed: Information includes Meter Id, Room Description (Nickname), Hostel Name/Number (for multiple hostels) & Location Pincode.
- Search (to narrow down listing) is based on Meter Id (Room Number) and Hostelwise Listing (for multiple hostels).
- Clicking on View Details will display the screen for the specific Meter Id (Room Number).
ROOM DETAILS
- Core user information displayed which includes Meter Id, Room Description (Nickname), Hostel Name/Number (for multiple hostels) & Current User Data (Name/Email Id)
- On the left, the Month Wise consumption is presented as a bar graph covering the past 6 months, allowing for easy visual comparison of usage trends.
- On the right, details for the current month displayed, including Meter Id, Room Description, Billing Date (Monthly Date), Total Energy Consumed (Units kWh) & Total Amount Payable.
- The currency can be updated as applicable. The rate per unit can be either flat or slabwise
- Users can download the receipt, which is instantly delivered in PDF format. There would be a provision to generate the statement on the billing date and send the same directly to the end user via email.
Ohm for Business - Hostel Energy Management is accessible via Web based CRM dashboard using an easy-to-understand interface, for both management & ground executives positioned as a real time auditing tool.
The solution is immensely useful to track multiple rooms & hostels simultaneously, and provides both breakdown of roomwise outgoings. The common expenses also thus can be deduced. Additional analytical data at a glance includes average consumption per room, lowest consumers (tracing most efficient consumers), heaviest consumers (tracing abuse & wastage).
The client is therefore delighted with the accurate data granularity that is made available. This has helped in computing the power charges billable to the specific users. Further, with the live dashboard and day wise hourly consumption reports, the pattern of consumption is noted and this is very useful to audit usage, reduce unwanted usage and trace abuse. Energy efficiency campaigns can also be developed with such insights.