“What if your utility meter acts like a big daddy here and talks back to you about your usage & advises you where your consumption is high & how you can safe?”

Well! That’s a Smart metering solution! We are not far behind and not fully there yet! But with the internet of things development surely we are getting there at full throttle!

Back in the 1970’s traditional electromechanical meters and soon after automated electronic meters were in usage. However, these provided only one-way communication. With the advancement of IoT in every sector, smart metering evolved at the right time. Smart metering systems record & monitor the electric energy consumption, enabling two-way communication.

Smart Metering Infrastructure

A smart metering system is made up of smart meters, communication links and control devices.

Functionalities of Smart Metering

First, let’s see, what is smart metering in IoT solutions. Smart Metering is an internet-based device for measuring gas, water, and energy consumption for commercial and homebuilding.

Signal acquisition – Where it collects and stores the data

Signal conditioning – Used to process the acquired data and manipulate the signal

Analog to Digital conversion – To minimize the errors and make it easier to process and store, ADC converts into quantifiable data

Quantitative measurement – Using several topologies, physical principles, Smart meters helps to measure the quantity of the medium

Advanced Metering infrastructure (AMI) is an integration of connecting smart meter systems, communication protocols, and networks, along with data management systems that ensures to have a two-way communication system between utilities and customers. An advanced metering smart grid solution is a way forward to build an efficient and reliable electricity usage system.

Smart Metering Solutions and its Capabilities

“Smart Metering helps to provide an interoperable, scalable and secure solution with distinct meters and transmits & analysis the meter data for better performance.”

1) Smart Monitoring System

Remote monitoring helps to build a greener ecosystem by collecting hundreds and thousands of data and analyzing them to get better performance. Smart remote monitoring in water meter systems helps to detect leakage by the smart sensors. These water-flow monitoring systems work on wireless networks where software analysis is performed at a centralized hub or control center.

Benefits of remote monitoring:

• Limit the downtime

• Keeps track of the health status of your equipments

• It helps to lower the total cost of ownership

• Increases the productivity

2) Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI):

AMI’s provide a metering solution with intelligence that helps the cost of energy consumption effectively and prevent them from paying higher utility bills. Any power outage in any of the utility centers or power substations can be remotely detected through the advanced infrastructure. It also performs remote diagnosis.

Benefits of Intelligent Advanced Metering Infrastructure:

• Accurate billing system

• Resolves the power failure with great turnaround

• Helps to make intelligent decision making with respect to daily energy consumptions

3) Predictive Maintenance

Now all the transformers, utility center street by street can be brought under the radar of surveillance through IoT’s predictive maintenance systems. In any major electric outage throughout history, unplanned maintenance issues play a major role. Also, emergency weather conditions also ruin the power facilities taking a longer time to recover.

Benefits of Predictive maintenance:

• Recover soon from catastrophic failure

• Improve the equipment durability

• Take adequate preventive measures to minimize maintenance costs

• Decrease the OPEX process

4) Ontime Service & Maintenance solution

Effective maintenance requires the right solution at the right time. That is what IoT smart metering solutions offer to the customers. Right from addressing the key issues like high water pressure, natural calamities that disrupt the day-to-day activities are prioritized accordingly.

• Fault management in smart energy meter solutions enable different levels of escalations

• Major and minor issues are consolidated by setting alert systems

• Offering uninterrupted supply through smart metering

• Handles critical issues with no additional cost or time

5) Data Analytics through Reports & Dashboards

Business Intelligence tools like Power BI, Tableau, Microstrategy, etc are created to provide in-depth data insights driven from the huge data from the IoT sensor devices. For instance, cybersecurity issues can be prevented by integrating smart metering and solutions with BI software to get weekly/monthly reports.

• Advanced reporting software delivers specific data to the customer in form of reports

• Schedule reports that is categorized based on important Key performance indexes and send across the appropriate team

• Create custom report on the go with no coding or prior knowledge to navigate these tools

• Get granular data with respect to site level or region level critical issues.

6) Geo-Location and Mobile App

Track all your information anywhere across the world with an interactive mobile app where it pin-points utility data site-wise and region-wise spread all over the map. With different colour icons, it displays the high priority to low one from the thousands of gas/water/power utility meters for a particular region or county.

• Get instant alerts & informations about the utility data

• Supports cross-platforms including IoS, Android, web

• Easy to read user interface

• One-time maintenance services and increases the overall efficiency

CONTUS’ Smart Metering Solution

CONTUS provides a salient smart metering solution that helps to convert the current meters into a smart metering solution. Whatever the data is collected from the sensors are directly uploaded to the cloud. From there we can remotely monitor the behavioural patterns, power consumption peak time, failure rate, factors causing slow down, etc and then take an informed business decision.

CONTUS’ Smart metering offers:

• Accurate billing

• Detect theft/ unauthorized activities

• Upgrades configuration to the date

• Collects data in demand forecasting

• Cloud-enabled smart meter data management software

• Data analytical tools to analysis and get actionable insights of the sensor data

• Wireless smart meter covering wider range

Smart metering Dashboard

The smart dashboard provides useful metrics that are recorded per day based on the daily consumption of water, gas, and energy in a readable format like pie/chart that can be filtered at the granular data level. Our smart metering solution provides a structure for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) that is deployed in smart cities with smart meter analytics and smart meter data analytics tools

Meter usage summary

With logistics planning and realistic timeframe, roll out the smart meter installations for your business. Organizing a clean, testing phase for a smaller energy unit and then transferring to the entire business is a smart move. Install adequate metering points with specific sensors like pressure sensors to monitor the water level, leakage sensor or temperature sensor for predictive maintenance to give you a holistic view to take better decision making with these data insights.