An important part of sustainability is understanding energy
consumption. Therefore, OSU tracks monthly energy, water and
steam usage on campus by reading and recording data from every
meter in each building on campus. This monthly task takes many
hours as campus has many buildings and each building can have
several meters. During meter reading, data is input into a
tablet PC, transferred to a computer in the sustainability
office and compared to previous month/year’s entries. When an
abnormal usage is found, a re-read of the meter is performed to
determine if there was an input error or if the building is
truly experiencing abnormal usage for that month. While many
meters on campus are digital, some meters are analog (“old
school”) dial meters. Due to the nature of analog meters, they
can be difficult to accurately read under certain circumstances
making human error a likely possibility. If there was not an
error in meter read, the building is further evaluated to
determine causes of the change in usage. Due