{"id":1479,"date":"2015-04-23T07:05:30","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T12:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.enseva.com\/?p=1479"},"modified":"2015-04-23T09:26:43","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T14:26:43","slug":"1479","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/?p=1479","title":{"rendered":"Utility Billing – Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Part III of How Enseva Makes Colocation Better<\/em>, I touched briefly on the topic of how kilowatt-hour usage calculations will often vary between colocation providers.\u00a0As promised, I plan to elaborate and compare the different methodologies I\u2019ve personally seen in various multitenant facilities.<\/p>\n

POINT-IN-TIME<\/strong>
\nThe most common method I see utilized requires a technician with a mobile Current Clamp or Current Probe designed to non-invasively measure the volume of power consumed using a current transformer.\u00a0The clap is attached around the electrical wires (usually in a breaker distribution panel) and provides a real-time measurement in amperes.\u00a0These ampere measurements, or \u201camps,\u201d are later used in a formula to estimate the amount of power consumed.<\/p>\n

Below is an electrical graph generated by Pentagon (Enseva\u2019s monitoring platform).\u00a0In this graph, we see three individual lines.\u00a0Each line represents a phase of power in a three-phase receptacle.\u00a0This particular breaker happens to be an L21-30 (208v 3P 30Amp) breaker.\u00a0The resolution of the graph is 30 days, and we can clearly see not only fluctuations in electrical draw throughout the day, but also several distinct jumps in electrical usage consistent with new servers being deployed.<\/p>\n

\"1D-3<\/a><\/p>\n

At the end of the month, a datacenter technician would use a current prove to lease the amount of current consumed by the particular electrical breaker supplying power to a cabinet.\u00a0In the graph below, the Enseva Blue line to the far right represents the point when that measurement would have been taken by the technician.<\/p>\n

\"1D-3<\/a><\/p>\n

The results of the measurements would have been 3.65A for Phase I, 3.5A for Phase II and 3.4A for Phase III.\u00a0 Because we happen to be measuring individual 120v delivered, the math to convert amps to Watts\/kWatts is simple.\u00a0 Amps * Volts \/ 1000 = kilowatts.<\/p>\n

3.65 * 120v \/ 1000 = 0.438kW<\/p>\n

3.65 * 120v \/ 1000 = 0 .42kW<\/p>\n

3.65 * 120v \/ 1000 = 0.408kW<\/p>\n

Which \u2014 when added up \u2014 provides us with a total of 1.266kW of current load.\u00a0This happens to be a rather lightly loaded cabinet compared to others throughout the facility.\u00a0Regardless of the electrical draw, a very valid argument holds true.<\/p>\n

We now need to add a volume of time to the equation.\u00a0Kilowatt-hour is the measure of a unity of energy over a period of one hour and is the standard measurement used by utility companies to bill for consumed electricity.\u00a0For the purposes of this blog, we\u2019ll assume the present month has 30 days. So converting a 1.266kW load to kilowatt-hours is as simple as kW * 24hrs * 30Days or 911.52kWh\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The datacenter would then invoice the customer at whatever its current electrical rate is times the 911.52 value it just came up with.\u00a0If you haven\u2019t already noticed, the previous graphs show a technician taking usage measurements at the tail end of a month, at the peak of that particular customer\u2019s energy usage.\u00a0You may be asking, \u201cDoes this mean the customer paid for energy that wasn\u2019t actually consumed at the beginning of the month?\u201d\u00a0The answer is \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n

The measurement resolution for these point-in-time readings is one month.\u00a0This means that whenever the measurement was taken, it\u2019s assumed<\/span> to be your average usage and that average usage is the basis for determining your electrical bill for the entire month.\u00a0We can clearly see that in this case that\u2019s not a true statement.<\/p>\n

REAL TIME<\/strong>
\nThanks to Enseva\u2019s branch-circuit monitoring systems, measurements are taken in five-minute samples, which gives us a resolution of five minutes as opposed to one month.\u00a0This level of resolution permits Enseva to capture intricate details on customer loads, which you can see in the previous graphs.<\/p>\n

When we reviewed the same breaker above, during the exact same time frame, we found that the actual kWh usage for this circuit was 780kWh\u2019s when using the higher resolution measurements.\u00a0The difference between the two methods is approximately 132kWh\u2019s, or 14.4%.\u00a0When multiplied by hundreds of breakers, this could result in tens of thousands of dollars in savings annually, in addition to the other benefits outlined in the article this blog post is referencing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Part III of How Enseva Makes Colocation Better, I touched briefly on the topic of how kilowatt-hour usage calculations will often vary between colocation providers.\u00a0As promised, I plan to elaborate and compare the different methodologies I\u2019ve personally seen in various multitenant facilities. POINT-IN-TIME The most common method I see utilized requires a technician with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1479"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1491,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions\/1491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}