Over the next few weeks we are rolling out a bottom-up redesign of our energy management application. The new interface and features come out of countless conversations with customers, and we’re hopeful that you’ll love the new software as much as we do.
Here are some of the things you have to look forward to.
Tighter app integration
Over the past few years, Gridium developed a suite of applications focused on different aspects of energy management.
- Snapmeter excels at demand management and fault diagnostics, including a weekly email that gives you an essential snapshot of building performance.
- Billcast provides budget forecasts and bill variance analysis, giving you deep insight into your energy spend.
- RCx provides a long-term view of building trends, helping you identify slow-rolling problems and the best sources of savings.
Unfortunately, each of these applications was developed at a different point in time, and the connections between them were weaker than they could have been.
With the new release, the walls between the products have been torn down. In fact, we’re retiring the names Billcast and RCx entirely (you never used them anyway). The entire suite is now just Snapmeter, and you get all of the data and analytics in a single integrated package.
Insanely great energy data browsing
The interval data load chart is in many ways the heart of an energy management application. When you really need to know exactly what’s going on in your building, you drill down into the 15-minute data to check out every peak and dip.
Our old interval data charts were pretty nice, but for the redesign we wanted to do better. In fact, we wanted to build the best interval data browser in the world.
The new load chart lets you pan and zoom to your heart’s content. It’s crazy fast. It has enhanced overlays, so you can see, for example, temperature data or actual vs. expected demand directly on the chart. You can even stack multiple meters onto a single graph to compare them to one another.
We think we succeeded in our goal of building the world’s best energy data browser, but of course there’s always room for improvement. Let us know what you think.
Portfolio management
Gridium’s larger customers have unique challenges. If you have a team of dozens of engineers managing hundreds of buildings, you need a way to structure and organize your data.
The new Snapmeter allows you to bundle meters and buildings into user-defined groups, so that you can focus on just the data that you’re interested in. You can easily calculate aggregate metrics for these groups, so that you know, for example, your total spend and energy use for specific campuses or geographic areas.
Deeper analytics
Of course, Gridium’s secret sauce has always been analytics, the advanced statistical techniques that allow us to pull operationally relevant information out of the data noise. I will be writing separate posts diving into the details of our enhanced analytics, but suffice it to say we’ve made some major upgrades under the hood.
One of the most exciting is the integration of our industry-leading* measurement and verification (M&V) algorithm. This means that measuring project outcomes is as easy as plugging in a project start date. The M&V algorithm performs a what-if analysis to tell you how much energy you’re saving compared to the pre-project baseline, controlling for variation due to weather. No more guessing at energy savings by staring at bills.
* Normally terms like “industry-leading” are so much marketing fluff, but in this case we can actually back it up. Our M&V algorithm was included in a research project conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and it outperformed all others by most metrics.
Flexible reporting
In our conversations with customers, we noticed that everyone has slightly different reporting needs. Each customer has a preferred set of metrics for tracking building performance and setting operational goals.
So we built a flexible reporting engine that allows you to track exactly the data you want to track.
Do you prefer calendarized costs or do you track actual bill values? Either way, we have you covered.
Are you interested in individual electricity services, or do you prefer to roll everything up to the building level? Take your pick.
Speaking of roll-ups, do you like monthly, quarterly, or annual metrics? How about all of the above?
Choose any baseline you like for measuring changes over time. Year on year comparisons, month on month, percent change, absolute change, whatever.
And we continue to add new metrics to the reporting engine all of the time.
Where to from here?
The new Snapmeter is a beginning, not an end. We are rolling it out to customers in waves over the next few weeks, so that we have time to fix any bugs that crop up and also to respond to feature requests. Speaking of which: we plan to keep building and improving, so please let us know where you’d like to see us go next. There’s a good chance your suggestion will end up in the next update!
