Using API, e-mail, SFTP and system integrations!
Data points are the foundation of energy monitoring, and these are collected from a wide variety of sources, all with their own formats, resolutions, intervalls and qualities. The Mestro Portal is a flexible data base that is built to handle these variations.
Data points can be imported via SMTP (e-mail), SFTP, manual input, web services, data base- and control system integration and so forth. Common formats include .csv, .xls, and .txt.
Mestro Portal supports data resolution from monthly values to every second.
Import of data points is performed with intervals of month, week, day, hour, minute or second, depending on the data source.
A data point can come in two different varieties, usage and meterstand. Usage is the difference between two meterstands. The quality of the measurements is dependent on whether the data is quality checked before export, or if it consists of raw data. This differs between individual data sources.
In order to minimize the need to manually collect data points, many energy meters, called smart meters, are able to automatically communicate with other systems. Communication between two systems without any human involvement is called M2M (machine to machine). the following types of M2M communications are good to know:
EDIEL - Standard for information exchange in the European energy market. Consumption of electricity, natural gas and district heating can be delivered through EDIEL on a monthly, daily, hourly or quarterly basis.
FI2 - Standard for information exchange in real estate companies, that is also used by some energy companies to deliver monthly or hourly consumption.
Remotely read measuring systems with M-Bus gateway. Within this category, a wide variety of different brands offers possibilities for export of data points from main- and sub meters. this alternative often comes with high flexibility regarding resolutions and values.
Control systems with energy log. many modern control systems logs the energy use for the meters that are connected to the system. these data points can often be exported or available for data base extraction.