A property manager calls about a 1958 mixed-use building downtown. The utility wants time-of-use metering installed by next quarter, the tenants want their AC to keep running through the switchover, and nobody on the ownership side wants to hear the words “full rewire”.
This is, more or less, how most smart grid retrofit jobs start. The building was never designed to talk to anything. Now it has to.
Old panels weren’t built with data in mind. They were built to distribute power safely and, if the electrician was thorough, to be labeled well enough that the next person could find breaker 14 without guessing. [Read more…] about Retrofitting Old Buildings for Smart Grid Compliance: What Contractors Need to Know