TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT
DEVICE ENGINEERING

Smart metering refers to digital, intelligent meters and metering systems. These are used to record the consumption of electricity, gas, heat and water. As the share of renewable energies increases, they are expected to play a key role in the future and help save heating costs.

The infrastructure required for submetering includes heat cost allocators, heat meters, water meters, electricity meters and smoke detectors, all of which must have the standardized OMS radio format. An encryption process with AES keys provides maximum security when recording and transmitting meter values.

AMR + GATEWAYS

The automatic recording of all consumption values of the individual measuring devices – the so-called AMR (Automated Meter Reading) – is carried out via gateways (e.g. OMS, Lora). These gateways collect the consumption values on site and transmit them to the associated metering service provider for further processing in the area of consumption display or billing generation. The use of gateways avoids time-consuming scheduling and on-site readings.

SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS
BACKEND / PORTALS

The measured values determined by the use of digital measurement technology and gateways are basically used for the evaluation and visualization of consumption values. With the help of apps or portals, a homeowner can constantly monitor the energy consumption of their home from anywhere. A backend is the basis for the central storage of all measurement and consumption values.

Tenants have the possibility to check their consumption regularly, in order to be encouraged to save energy.

Technical departments of metering service providers can use these portals to promptly identify faulty, defective or failed meters and promptly rectify the resulting problems. This fact leads to fewer estimates and thus significantly better billing results. Via integrated functions, the central backend offers options for importing data from third-party portals or automatically forwarding data to other portals, in addition to managing measured values by means of transmission from connected gateways.

ACCOUNTS AND MANAGEMENT

Smart metering service means cost savings in the area of metering and billing. Intelligent software solutions only require information on the costs incurred and user changes in the relevant billing period to generate the statements. Costs from existing rental or maintenance contracts, as well as costs from the calculation of the own service, are transferred to the billing through the integrated invoice, without manual processing. Consumption values are already available in full when billing is started and are thus processed directly.

Automated plausibility checks help the user to create correct, legally compliant invoices – subsequent corrections are therefore unnecessary in most cases.

Interfaces offer convenient solutions for exchanging results with property managers and other partners after the billing process is complete. For this purpose, transfer functions to financial accounting systems and banking software are available for the invoicing area, and DTA interfaces up to integrated billing are available for the billing area.

Info on PROHKA at sk-soft.com/prohka