Omniflex Cures NHS Energy Monitoring Headache

ABOUT THE TRUST

As one of the leading hospital groups in the United Kingdom, most people recognise the Brad-ford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust through their two teaching hospitals, Bradford Royal Infirmary, and St. Luke’s Hospital.



The Foundation Trust is responsi-ble for providing acute hospital care services for the people of Bradford and neighbouring communities. It has around 1,200 beds serving a community of over a million people, has an annual budget of £230 million and em-ploys over 5,000 staff.



THE CHALLENGE

The NHS Foundation Trust wanted to upgrade the existing energy reporting over the two hospitals to include usage data every 30 minutes reliably over the entire site.



There was a mix of existing intelligent meters and pulse meters installed and that could not be replaced due to the cost constraint.



Furthermore, the Trust wanted to minimise network installation cost by utilising the existing Ethernet backbone around the site, but a limitation of the number of avail-able IP addresses was also a consideration to be taken into account.



Network downtime is a reality and dealing with these network outages without losing the 30 minute updates was also a challenge to be overcome.



THE SOLUTION

Omniflex deployed 13 of its Teleterm M2em Meter Concentra-tor Modules across the two sites, counting pulses from the pulse meters, and polling the smart meters for their data. These modules then send the data every thirty minutes to central server on the site. If the network is down, then these concentrator modules queue the data so that no informa-tion is ever lost due to network outages, or server unavailability.



This increased the reliability of the system over conventional polling methods, and reduced the number of IP addresses required to a manageable number for the the IT department.



THE RESULT

The Omnergy MDAS Server located in the hospital’s data centre stores all the metering history on an ongoing basis and makes the data available to the hospital facilities manager via a web interface making it easy to access the data and reports via any web browser.



CSV file exports make this data available for import into the hospital’s legacy systems.



Omniflex provided a cost effective solution for us to gather data from our distributed energy meters/ sub meters from all areas of our hospitals to enable us to monitor and manage our energy usage efficiently. I’m very pleased with outcome. said Nsipa Siwale, Energy Manager Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust