How do you handle the M&V plan wording to cover a situation where meters used are 30 years old? | Video

CIET's Ask Us Anything series is a free monthly Q&A session with industry experts.

In our Measurement and Verification (M&V) Ask Us Anything session, two subject matter experts, answered questions about the latest developments and applications in M&V in a dynamic, interactive format.

From emerging technologies to new methodologies, the experts provided real-time insights and explored what's new in the field and how innovations are shaping energy efficiency and performance verification.

Here is a highlight from the session.

Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Question: How do you handle the M&V plan wording to cover a situation where meters used for data collection are approximately 30 years old and there’s no objective evidence for calibration records?

Answer:

Maelys: This is a very real life question. Something that's important to understand is sometimes we have these meters that are installed in facilities and it's hard to replace them, it's hard to change them, it's hard to even recalibrate them because they're in certain locations. So that's something that we, of course, want to use because that's going to reduce the cost of our M&V, but if we can't really trust what they're saying, that's of course an issue.

I think if we want to be following the M&V requirements around understanding the uncertainty of a piece of equipment and whether it's still calibrated, it might be a good idea to do a calibration by measuring the same consumption with another device, if that's an option. So where you would see your permanent meter, you wouldn't necessarily recalibrate it, but if you're measuring the same output with a different meter, a temporary one, then you could see if there's a delta between the two and kind of use that as your calibration for the permanent meter.

If that's not a possibility, I think you would want to have some level of accuracy adjustments because that meter might have been plus/ minus 1 percent 30 years ago, but maybe we want to account for the loss of accuracy across the year and go with something a little bit higher just to cover ourselves and be conservative.

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