Energy reporting for
a rental portfolio,
in one place.
FRPO's Certified Rental Building™ Program asks every certified building to keep monthly energy, water and waste records. The standard accepts a spreadsheet, and an auditor checks it every three years. That works for one building. It does not let anyone compare buildings or see how the programme is doing. Quwa was hired to build the platform that does. FRPO owns it and runs it.
- Client
- Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario
- Programme
- Certified Rental Building™ Program
- Sector
- Multi-residential rental housing, Ontario
- Our role
- Defining, engineering and delivering the platform
- Ownership
- Source code, database, documentation and designs belong to FRPO
- Hosting
- FRPO's own environment, set up with our help
- Utility data
- ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager, read and aggregated on the server
Most of this is engineering, not screens. The work was deciding how each number gets calculated and what it can honestly be used for.
A spreadsheet
per building is
not a portfolio.
FRPO set up the programme in 2008. It certifies how apartment buildings are run, against published standards, checked by independent auditors. Its environmental standards require monthly energy, water and waste records, and the audit criterion accepts them “in spreadsheet/or other format.” Members met that. It just does not add up to anything across buildings.
| What the standard gets you | What it cannot get you |
|---|---|
| A record for each building: electricity, gas, water and waste. | Any way to compare two buildings. Nothing is normalised and no two files match. |
| Proof somebody looked at the numbers. | Anything continuous. The check comes round every three to four years. |
| Unusual consumption is meant to be spotted. | Any record of what was done about it. |
| Each building knows its own consumption. | A view across the whole certified portfolio. |
Built for the
programme.
Owned by it.
FRPO chose a purpose-built platform over a licensed one. The programme's workflow is not something off-the-shelf tools support, and owning the data mattered. The code, database and designs are FRPO's, and it runs on FRPO's own hosting.
Questions that
are now a screen.
There is no savings figure at the bottom of this page. The project built a measuring instrument. What it gives you first is questions you could not ask before.
| Question | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Which of our buildings is worst? | Not answerable across operators. | Ranked by intensity against a peer group, withheld where the data cannot support it. |
| How much of this number is real? | Not recorded. | Coverage and estimated share on every figure. |
| Where is the energy going? | An audit, or a guess. | Five categories that add up to the meter, labelled as an estimate. |
| What should we fix first? | Flagged, then not tracked. | A ranked screening list with the matching rebates one click away. |
| How is the programme doing overall? | Not answerable. | A portfolio roll-up against the reduction path. |
The same method,
one building
at a time.
Work out what a building actually uses, say how far the number can be trusted, and price the fix before anyone commits. Q-Energy does that for individual commercial and multi-residential buildings.
Thirty minutes, with the engineer who would run the work.
No cost and no obligation. Bring twelve months of utility bills if you have them — that alone is usually enough to say whether a building has a capital problem or a controls problem.