How Technology Has Made Energy Audits More Straightforward

Energy auditors should have several tools at their disposal to assist them in finding and measuring energy savings potential.

FREMONT, CA: Energy auditing was once a time-consuming and laborious task. Even for modest facilities, conducting an energy audit required hours of data collection, organization, and analysis. The auditing process has grown faster, easier, and more accurate due to advancements in energy auditing software, resulting in better results the first time. Here are five ways that technology has simplified energy audits:

APPLICABLE TO ANY DEVICE: In recent years, technology has advanced at a breakneck pace, with desktop PCs and laptops being phased out in favor of smartphones and tablets in a wide variety of contexts. Modern energy auditing software is designed to work with a wide variety of devices. Instead of a platform that is limited to a single device, energy sector officers get a cloud-based platform that works on any device. Additionally, they can access data collected on a mobile device while conducting an audit on a desktop computer without downloading data from one device to the other.

NO MORE DIFFICULT SPREADSHEETS: Certain individuals take great pleasure in configuring a sophisticated spreadsheet in Excel. However, for many, this data processing tool is just another thing people lack time to understand and apply fully. Using energy auditing software eliminates creating a spreadsheet to collect, categorize, and evaluate acquired data. Rather than that, the software collects and analyses all the data for them faster than they can sort cells from A to Z.

MATCH PICTURES AND DATA EASILY: Traditionally conducted energy audits required energy sector officers to take photographs with a camera and write notes on a piece of paper about which photograph corresponded to which data. Then they had to spend a significant amount of time back in the office matching up the data and images, hoping they got everything correct. Energy auditing software enables them to record images, measurements, notes, and other data concurrently, ensuring that nothing is overlooked. This leads to more precise final results while streamlining and speeding up the audit process as a whole.

QUICKLY DECIPHER DATA: When energy sector officers are not attempting to decipher chicken-scratched measurements and notes, their energy audit can proceed more rapidly. When energy audits were conducted using pencil and paper, the auditors had to take meticulous notes or risk illegible data and an erroneous audit. Contemporary software may record measurements, take notes about locations, and take images all within the app in real-time. They no longer have to trust that their handwriting will be legible hours later, as all of their information is stored in the app. This prevents them from redoing portions or their entire audit to ensure that the data they obtained is accurate.