Columbia University
OP-T2-45: Building Water Metering

Apartment buildings have their own water meters. Columbia has contracted a company to benchmark and track water usage to see if there are abnormalities to reduce consumption in the future; is water use changing in ways it shouldn’t. Academic buildings on the Morningside Campus are supplied with domestic water that is metered in four central locations. It is the intent of the University that all academic buildings will have individual meters for all utilities in the near future under a campus wide master metering initiative. Phase I of this initiative, in which 14 undergraduate buildings were fitted out with BUDA panels was completed in September of 2012. BUDA stands for Building Utility Data Acquisition. Under this project, individual building utility data is collected through a building based PLC panel, BUDA, and then transmitted to the recently installed Central Energy Plant SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. A dashboard is set up for real time monitoring and the data is saved in historians to facilitate building use evaluation and analysis. The BUDA project is not limited to monitoring domestic water consumption, only, but tracks steam, chilled water and electricity usage, as well. Domestic water in Residence Hall buildings is metered individually on a building wide basis. Currently, 21 of 30 Residence Halls have meters, consumption on the 9 remaining smaller properties is estimated on building frontage. The University is providing water meters to these properties and estimates completion in September of 2013. The majority of Residence Halls are metered individually. Currently out of 30 Residence Halls 21 are metered and 9 are not. Columbia is currently installing meters where they do not exist and expect to have all Residence halls metered by December 2012. Currently the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, who handles billing and processes for water use within the 5 boroughs, is in the process of installing Automated Meter Readers (AMR) for all of their accounts. 14 of CUMC’s 16 buildings are currently sub-metered with the remaining 2 being planned for conversion in the next 6 months. These meters allow the CUMC campus to track water and sewer consumption and use for individual buildings down to the hour. NYC water metering requirements: http://www.nycbenchmark.com/ll84summary