Anomaly detection and alerts that reach you in time

Detection covers weekend usage, overnight spikes, missing reads and holiday baselines, the four patterns a monthly total hides. Weekend usage above the normal weekend floor, overnight spikes outside occupied hours, missing reads where a data flow has stopped and holiday baselines that fail to fall are all detected automatically. Consumption is weather-adjusted using heating and cooling degree days, so a cold week does not generate noise and a genuine drift is not hidden by mild weather.

Every flag is traceable. You can move from a portfolio view down to a site, a building, a meter or an individual circuit, then into a single half-hour, and read the same data aggregated hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or annually. Where wireless or clip-on sub-metering is installed at circuit, sub-circuit or asset level, the same detection runs on those channels, which is how a fault gets attributed to one piece of plant rather than to a whole building.

Thresholds are configurable per meter and per sub-meter, and can be expressed in kWh, kW, pounds or kgCO2e, so a facilities lead can watch kW at a half-hourly site while a finance director watches spend across a portfolio. Alerts are delivered by email, SMS or webhook. Each recipient chooses a daily digest or a real-time alert, and escalation routing sends the alert on to further recipients.

Access is role based with an audit trail, permissions are set per site, per group and per function, and there is no cap on the number of users, so adding a site manager to one building's alerts does not mean handing them the whole portfolio. Accounts run from one meter to more than 1,000, with sub-meters in addition, and every site sits under one login regardless of which supplier serves it.

Peak-demand and DUoS red-band exposure is flagged before the charge hits the bill, which is the difference between changing a schedule and paying for it. Half-hourly electricity, gas and water refresh roughly every 30 minutes after settlement, non-half-hourly meters come in through AMR and supplier billing data with AMR refreshing daily, and sub-meters report at their own device cadence. The alert therefore lands close enough to the event for someone to act on the same day.

The same alerting covers the commercial side. Bills are validated against the contracted rate line by line every billing cycle, and when an overcharge is flagged Purely's account team raises the credit note with the supplier and chases it to ledger, with the credit, the date it landed and the reason shown in the monthly reconciliation pack. Renewal-window alerts arrive at 6, 9 and 12 months before contract end, ahead of the point where the options start to narrow.

A multi-academy trust with 22 schools used weekend baseload alerting to find where buildings were not shutting down. Six sites were running weekend baseload above 8 kW. A BMS reset across all six followed, with a projected £41k saving for the academic year. Nothing about that finding needed new hardware or a site survey. It needed the weekend pattern to be visible site by site, and an alert to reach the person able to change the schedule.

Baseload is why weekend alerting earns its place. As an industry-typical range, baseload for offices and schools sits at 15 to 25 percent of total kWh, and anything above 35 percent usually points to a BMS schedule or an always-on plant fault rather than to occupancy. Those are industry figures rather than Purely measurements, but they give you a threshold worth setting on day one, and the platform will tell you which of your sites sits outside it.