Energy monitoring for schools, academies and trusts

A school estate has three consumption states, not one: term-time occupied, holiday shutdown and weekend. Purely Insights records half-hourly electricity, gas and water at meter level, refreshed roughly every 30 minutes after settlement, so each state has its own measured profile rather than an assumed one. Consumption is weather-adjusted using heating and cooling degree days, which means this February compares fairly with last February and a mild half-term does not read as an efficiency win.

Anomaly detection then works against those baselines. Weekend usage, overnight spikes, missing reads and holiday baselines are flagged automatically, and thresholds are configurable per meter and per sub-meter in kWh, kW, pounds or kgCO2e. Alerts go to email, SMS or webhook, as a daily digest or in real time, with escalation routing so a heating exception on a Saturday reaches the site caretaker and the estates manager, not one inbox alone.

One anonymised example already published on the Energy Hub shows the scale of it: a multi-academy trust with 22 schools found 6 sites with weekend baseload above 8 kW, reset the building management system (BMS) across all 6, and projected a £41k saving for the academic year. As an industry-typical guide, baseload usually accounts for 15 to 25 percent of total kWh in an office or school, and anything above 35 percent normally points to a BMS schedule or always-on plant fault.

Trusts rarely have one supplier across every school. Purely Insights consolidates every site under a single login regardless of who supplies it, with site, building, meter and circuit views and drill-down to a single half-hour. Aggregations run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annually, and accounts hold 1 to 1,000+ meters plus sub-meters on top. Historical data goes back up to 6 years where supplier data flows allow, which is usually enough to show a governing body a real trend rather than a single year.

For a central bursar the useful view is school against school. Site-against-site benchmarking gives quartile and outlier views, and year-on-year and month-on-month comparisons are weather-adjusted so a cold spring does not disguise a poorly performing boiler house. Access is role-based with an audit trail, unlimited users per account and permissions set per site, group or function, so a head of school sees their own building, the estates team sees the whole portfolio and finance sees the money. Watford Grammar School and Bosvena School are Purely Energy clients.

Every billing cycle, each invoice is validated line-by-line against the contracted rate. When an overcharge is flagged, the Purely account team raises the credit note with the supplier and chases it to ledger, and the credit, the date it landed and the reason all appear in the monthly reconciliation pack. The trust does nothing. Billing itself stays simple: 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.

Budget setting runs on a school-year cycle, so renewal-window alerts fire at 12, 9 and 6 months before contract end. The renewal recommendation separates wholesale, non-commodity, supplier margin and Purely margin, so a bursar can show governors exactly what moved and why. Peak-demand and distribution use of system (DUoS) red-band exposure is flagged before the charge reaches the bill, which matters on sites running kitchens, sports halls or after-school lettings through the late-afternoon charging band.

Scope 1 gas and Scope 2 electricity emissions are tracked on both a location and a market basis, using the latest published DEFRA carbon factors, refreshed annually. Compliance exports cover SECR, ESOS Phase 4, an ISO 50001 evidence pack and CDP, so the trust reports from measured half-hourly data rather than a rebuilt spreadsheet of invoices. Exports come as CSV, Excel, PDF or board-pack PDF, and a read-only JSON API is available on request for finance, BI, ESG and BMS integration.

Getting live takes 7 to 14 working days from contract signature. The trust signs the supply contract, provides a portfolio list or uploads recent bills, accepts the data-access letters of authority and picks alert recipients. Where circuit-level detail is wanted, Purely supplies, installs and owns wireless and clip-on sub-meters at circuit, sub-circuit or asset level, with no lease and no capex, and the sensors are returned at no notice cost if the trust leaves. Data is held in the UK, the customer owns it, Purely holds Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001 certification is in progress.