Mannheim, October 16, 2023: Mannheim-based PPC and Swiss company Belimo have successfully connected heat meters to the iMSys via the CLS channel. This success demonstrates that even meters and sectors outside the scope of submetering solutions—which are currently the focus of the housing industry—can be quickly and easily integrated into the smart metering system.
The requirements of the Heating Costs Ordinance are becoming increasingly relevant—not only for the traditional housing sector itself, but also in the commercial real estate and industrial sectors. Meters and existing systems are often used in these sectors that are less common in the housing sector and therefore must be connected via different protocols. In a laboratory test, Belimo and PPC—with support from Robotron—tackled this challenge by connecting Belimo’s heat meter to the Energiewelt system and any other infrastructure via the CLS interface of the smart metering system.
The focus of the lab setup was on successful hardware integration. The test environment consisted of an iMSys setup—including a PPC Smart Meter Gateway and a CLS Gateway—the Belimo 22PEM-1Ux heat meter, as well as a Gateway Administrator and aEMT for test operations (both from Robotron). This was the only way to ensure that the entire data transmission path was replicated—from measurement data acquisition, through the handshake between the systems, to data transfer and visualization in the backend system. To this end, successful data acquisition via ModBus TCP was carried out during the tests using the Robotron aEMT.
Figure 1: Schematic Diagram of the Heat Meter Connection
“This demonstrates once again that iMSys can be integrated across different sectors—the secure CLS interface makes it possible,” explains Karen Schmid, CLS Product Manager at PPC. “Implementing the Heating Costs Ordinance therefore need not be a daunting task for either metering service providers or submetering providers; rather, it can be implemented with minimal effort, even for large numbers of meters in existing installations.”
Udo Dehne, Product Manager for Sensors & Meters at Belimo, describes the advantages of the solution as follows: “Our priority is to offer customers in the sub-metering sector a reliable connection between thermal energy meters and the SMGW’s HAN interface. To do this, we rely on modern bus communication to meet the requirements of the German HKVO (Heating Cost Ordinance).”
“With the successfully tested PPC-Belimo setup, we are able to reliably transmit all relevant billing data from the energy meter (whether as a standalone device or as part of the control unit in the Belimo energy valve) to the aEMT (active external market participant) via an SMGW. Since it uses a standard BUS interface, no additional investment is required on the meter’s part.”
“Another advantage of this solution is the multi-client BUS architecture, which enables the parallel operation of iMSys (intelligent metering system) and a building management system. This flexibility allows customers to make optimal use of our systems and meet their sub-metering requirements.”
Belimo and PPC aim to continue paving the way for interoperable standards in the heating sector. This will enable the full scope of the iMSys infrastructure—currently under development—to be harnessed and ensure that commercial property operators can benefit from its high level of security.
