new balan – campus of ideas

HKVO – Recording energy meters and tenant
changes with the DEOS IoT platform

HKVO-compliant automatic consumption data recording

“More and more new tenants from a wide range of sectors and sizes are using our campus. As a landlord, we have to offer tenants energy and cost transparency that meets the legal requirements of the HKVO. Our tenants and the administration need direct and technically uncomplicated access to their energy costs,” says Philipp Schröder, CEO of Allgemeine SÜDBODEN Grundbesitz AG.

Background: The new Heating Costs Ordinance (HKVO) stipulates monthly tenant information on the energy consumption of the rented premises. The consumer has the right to a list of costs with additional information, such as a comparison with the previous month, the same month of the previous year and average consumption. The particular challenge in this project with SÜDBODEN was that the desired technical solution had to cover an extremely streamlined tenant changeover process. The management had very precise and specific requirements for this. New ideas from the management users that emerged during the course of the project also had to be implemented on schedule.

SÜDBODEN was looking for a modern and technically secure solution and ended up turning to DEOS AG. Convinced by the flexibility of DEOS’ own IoT platform, the integration expert from Rheine was also able to score points because the technical and functional requirements requested by SÜDBODEN were easy to implement. SÜDBODEN received a customized solution in terms of technology, operation, administration and data export.

The focus was on technical flexibility

The devices were connected to the DEOS IoT platform via M-Bus and LoRaWAN (standardized radio protocol, high building penetration, simple and inexpensive network infrastructure) for remote reading of the current 3000 energy meters (electricity, water, heat quantity). Only one OPEN GATE was needed in this project to act as a courage gateway to transfer the energy data to the DEOS IoT platform (pro.Building Suite) via MQTTS. The complete remote evaluation saves the otherwise very timeconsuming and costly meter reading. This solution also eliminates the need to visit the meters / the rental space and avoids meter reading errors.

The actual functional requirements and extensions were worked out individually between DEOS and SÜDBODEN in this project. The client paid particular attention to the “clean” change of tenants for the current 240 parties. A solution was developed here that SÜDBODEN can now administer itself: Tenant, contract number, rental space meter number and meter readings are automatically and uniquely linked and stored on the DEOS platform. This avoids the hassle of meter reading omissions and errors and significantly reduces the landlord’s personnel costs here too.

The MINOL billing system was connected to the DEOS IoT platform and draws the data for invoicing from there. The interim meter readings are sent to the tenants by email as a paperless PDF report in compliance with the HKVO. The focus here is on consumption transparency for the tenant and therefore clear and comprehensible billing. This creates a fast and cooperative path to digital heating cost billing for modern real estate management. For SÜDBODEN, this solution has also automated the administration process, making it more efficient.