Organising in-house meter readings

MeterPad (www.meterpad.com) is a free web service which allows organizations to set up coherent, consistent meter-reading schemes. The service provides a database with a separate secure area for your organization, with web pages for data input, editing and retrieval, and scheme management.

The scheme structure can accommodate any number of locations, each with a number of meters. Each meter can have one or more registers

Each user can be assigned one or more locations for which he or she can enter meter readings. This can be done in batches on a desktop PC, or direct into a portable web-enabled device such as a PDA, with meters presented to the users in sequences which they themselves can define. Readings can be taken at any interval down to one minute, and will be automatically timestamped if the appropriate web page is used for direct entry.

This 5-minute training video on data entry gives a good idea of what the 'user experience' is like for general users:

A compact browser format is provided to cater for devices with small screens

Administrators within the scheme can download the collected readings (they are delivered in spreadsheets) or edit, insert and delete records as required.

The scheme owner can issue 'tokens' to third parties, allowing them access to data from particular locations. This authenticates their requests without the need for them to log on, which means they can programme automated applications to collect and tabulate readings.

You can learn more by setting up a scheme for yourself. It's free up to a certain capacity: the current limit is 200 defined meter registers (a register being a readout, e.g. electricity night kWh; most meters have only one register).