1. Overview

Monitoring the performance of water and energy saving initiatives is essential to demonstrate the benefits, ensuring that systems operate to specification and are tuned for maximum savings to deliver fast pay-back on investments. And London based PA Energy who specialise in the supply, installation and ongoing monitoring of turnkey sub-metering systems have used Micronics ultrasonic, clamp-on flow and heat metering products to good effect on a wide range of water and or energy saving projects.

       

The projects have included rainwater harvesting, fuel cell and solar/thermal installations on commercial buildings in the London area and the simple clamp-on, non-invasive solutions from Micronics have offered significant advantages over the traditional alternative of in-line meters and their requirement for system drain-down, pipe cutting, re-filling systems and the associated costs, which are all avoided by the use of a clamp-on solution.

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2. The implementation of Ultrasonic submetering

For the rainwater harvesting project a claim for a reduction in the sewage charge is being developed by using a Micronics U3000 to demonstrate how much rainwater is being dumped to sewage by metering the amount of water being pumped into a grey water tank in comparison to the boosted cooling water entering the tank. Another application was measuring the LTHW heat flow from a fuel cell calorifier again with a U3000 to demonstrate the performance of the fuel cell process. And yet another was monitoring the heat transfer/performance from a solar/thermal panel by measuring the water /glycol mix and differential flow and return temperature with a heat calculator to calculate heat transfer to the buffer vessel heat exchanger to demonstrate the performance of the solar/thermal system i.e. that it was performing to specification.

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3. Considerations when installing Ultrasonic Meters

PA Energy selected clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters for the clear advantages of being low cost, non disruptive and simple to install in comparison to in-line meters and Micronics were selected as the supplier due to a combination of their long-term experience with non-invasive, clamp-on technology, product performance and pre-order assistance.

 

4. Conclusion and benefits enjoyed

PA’s Managing Director - Percy Albuquerque says “The Micronics clamp-on flow meters have proved to be an effective component in providing accurate water flow and heat measurement data for our web based aM&T plus data analysis services. The product performance has been good, even on partially filled pipes and on the rare occasions that we have had application problems the Micronics support has been good.”

About PA Energy

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Author: Percy Albuquerque is managing director of PA Energy and has been involved with pioneering the use of web based visualisations for demand-side energy and water management in 2003. He has interest in water and energy conservation and has given white papers in the UK and international events in India, South Africa and France on water and energy metering and monitoring.

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