Energy monitoring for retail, food and hospitality estates

A retail or hospitality estate is usually the same shop, restaurant or hotel repeated many times, which makes comparison the fastest route to savings. Purely Insights consolidates every site under one login regardless of supplier, then ranks them site against site with quartile and outlier views. Half-hourly electricity, gas and water are read at meter level and refresh roughly every 30 minutes after settlement, so a store that drifts out of line surfaces within days rather than at the next quarterly review.

Smaller sites are not left out of the picture. AMR meters refresh daily, supplier billing data covers the remainder, and manual upload is available as a fallback, so a mixed estate of HH (P5 to P8), NHH (P1 to P4), AMR and smart meters is measured on one basis. Capacity runs from 1 to 1,000+ meters per account with sub-meters in addition, and history goes back up to 6 years where supplier data flows allow.

Two stores rarely trade the same hours, and a coastal hotel does not face the same weather as an inner-city one. Purely Insights aggregates consumption hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annually, and weather-adjusts using heating and cooling degree days so like is compared with like. Year-on-year and month-on-month views carry the same adjustment, which stops a mild winter being read as an efficiency gain and stops a hot August being blamed on the kitchen.

Floor-area intensity gives a second reference point. Industry typical ranges are 250 to 450 kWh per square metre for retail and 150 to 250 for offices, and these are published sector ranges rather than Purely measured figures. The same caveat applies to baseload: industry typical baseload for offices and schools sits at 15 to 25 percent of total kWh, and above 35 percent usually indicates a schedule or an always-on plant fault. Use the ranges to frame the question, then read the half-hourly data for the answer.

Food retail and hospitality carry load that never switches off, and refrigeration is usually the largest part of it. Anomaly detection watches for overnight spikes, weekend usage against a holiday baseline and missing reads, while configurable thresholds can be set per meter and per sub-meter in kWh, kW, £ or kgCO2e. Alerts go by email, SMS or webhook, as a daily digest or in real time, with escalation routing so the duty manager and the head office team can both be on the list.

Where circuit level detail is needed, Purely supplies, installs and owns wireless and clip-on sub-meters at circuit, sub-circuit and asset level. The hardware sits on Purely's balance sheet and the data on the customer's, so there is no lease and no capex, and sensors are returned at no notice cost if the customer leaves. In one published example, a food and drink manufacturer on a single 12 GWh site used sub-metering on three production lines to isolate a refrigeration setpoint drift, fixed it in one shift and cut baseload by 11 percent year on year.

Every bill is validated line by line against the contracted rate each billing cycle. When an overcharge is flagged, the Purely account team raises the credit note with the supplier and chases it to ledger, so the customer does nothing, and the credit, the date it landed and the reason appear in the monthly reconciliation pack. In one published example, a hotel group with 11 properties had a bill validation alert in month 2, and the supplier issued a £6,400 credit and corrected the going-forward rate.

Billing stays simple. Each month brings one supplier invoice per fuel per meter plus one free Purely-side reconciliation pack covering every site, every variance, every credit and the running annual position. There is never a separate Insights invoice. Role-based access with unlimited users and permissions per site, group or function lets an area manager see only their own sites while finance sees the whole estate, and an audit trail records who changed what.

Cost exposure is flagged before it lands. Peak demand and DUoS red-band exposure are surfaced ahead of the charge hitting the bill, and renewal-window alerts fire at 6, 9 and 12 months before contract end, with the recommendation showing wholesale, non-commodity, supplier margin and Purely margin separately. Exports cover CSV, Excel, PDF, board-pack PDF and a read-only JSON API on request, alongside SECR, ESOS Phase 4, ISO 50001 evidence pack and CDP outputs.