A central plant supplied chilled water to a dozen buildings across a campus and needed to bill each building for the cooling it actually consumed. The buildings were occupied and operational; draining risers to install inline BTU meters was neither affordable nor acceptable.
Permanent clamp-on BTU metering at each building's chilled water entry — flow measured non-invasively, plus matched-pair temperature sensors on supply and return. The METRI IC-UPF was specified for its 1:2500 turndown, which matters enormously here: a chilled water loop in August and the same loop in a mild spring are different orders of magnitude, and a narrow-turndown meter goes blind at the low end without telling anyone.
The ΔT was the accuracy bottleneck, not the flow. On these loops the temperature difference was modest, so matched-pair sensors were specified rather than generic RTDs — because the relative error in a small ΔT dominates the energy calculation. The flow measurement was never the limiting factor.
Campus energy billing is where clamp-on BTU has no real competition — you cannot drain an occupied building's riser. Spend the accuracy budget on the temperature sensors, and choose a meter with enough turndown to see the winter flows.
Send us the pipe and the fluid and we will tell you what will actually work.
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