A submetering or metering provider does not have a data shortage. It has a data flood. Thousands of meters across many buildings each produce a steady stream of interval reads, and every one of those streams has to be collected, stored, quality-checked, and eventually handed to someone who wants it in a form they can use. When the volume grows faster than the plumbing, the reads pile up, formats drift, and delivering a clean feed to a customer or an analytics platform becomes a recurring fire drill.
This guide is for the teams running that infrastructure. It covers the specific challenges of managing interval data at scale, why format standardization is the lever that makes everything else easier, and how to deliver data reliably to the customers and analytics tools that depend on it. The framing is Ontario-first, where submetering operates under a defined regulatory structure.
The Ontario Submetering Landscape
In Ontario, unit submetering measures the energy use of individual units within a multi-unit building, and it operates within a defined framework. Unit sub-meter providers are licensed and overseen by the Ontario Energy Board, and metering used for billing must be verified under federal rules administered by Measurement Canada. Consumer protection rules under Ontario's Energy Consumer Protection Act set expectations for how energy is billed to tenants through submetering. The point for a data team is that accuracy and traceability are not optional niceties. The meter reads you manage may sit behind a bill, so the data path from meter to customer has to be dependable and auditable.
Why Interval Data Is Hard at Volume
A single meter reporting at short intervals produces a large number of reads per day. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of meters and the operational challenges compound quickly.
- Volume: interval reads accumulate constantly, and storage and processing have to keep pace without falling behind.
- Gaps and irregularities: meters go offline, communications drop, and reads arrive late or out of order, leaving holes that have to be detected and handled.
- Format drift: different meter makes, models, and firmware can express the same reading in different ways, so raw output is rarely uniform.
- Time alignment: reads have to be anchored to the correct timestamps and time zones, including daylight saving changes, or downstream analysis quietly goes wrong.
- Identity: every read has to map to the correct meter, unit, and account, which is harder than it sounds across a large and changing portfolio.
- Validation: obvious errors, such as negative consumption or impossible spikes, need to be caught before the data reaches a bill or a report.
None of these is exotic on its own. The difficulty is doing all of them, continuously, across a large fleet, without a growing backlog.
Standardization Is the Lever
The single most effective move is to convert everything into one consistent format as early as possible. When every read, regardless of the meter it came from, is normalized into the same structure with the same fields, timestamps, and units, the rest of the pipeline gets simpler. Validation rules apply uniformly, storage schemas stay stable, and delivery does not have to special-case each meter type.
Green Button, based on the NAESB ESPI standard, provides a well-defined, widely recognized structure for energy usage information expressed in a consistent XML schema for metered resources such as electricity, gas, and water. Adopting a standard shape like this for your normalized data means the format you deliver is one your customers and their analytics tools are likely to already understand, rather than a bespoke layout they have to learn. Standard in, standard out, is far cheaper to maintain than a different format for every relationship.
A Reference Pipeline
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Collect | Pull reads from meters and gateways across all buildings and vendors |
| Normalize | Convert every read into one consistent format, units, and timestamp basis |
| Validate | Flag gaps, out-of-range values, and duplicates for handling |
| Store | Keep normalized reads in a stable, queryable structure |
| Deliver | Hand clean data to customers and analytics by API, CSV, or SFTP |
Keeping normalization early and delivery standardized means new meter types or new customers slot into the existing pipeline instead of forcing a rebuild.
Delivering Data People Can Actually Use
Managing the data well is only worth it if the data gets to where it is needed in a usable form. Different consumers want different channels:
- A REST API for platforms and portals that pull interval data on demand.
- CSV exports for analysts, spreadsheets, and ad hoc review.
- Scheduled SFTP drops for bulk loads into a customer's data warehouse or billing system.
- Embeddable components so a customer can see their own usage inside an existing interface.
The common requirement across all of them is consistency. Whether a customer takes the data hourly through an API or nightly through a file, the fields, units, and identifiers should be the same, so their analytics do not break when the delivery method changes.
Handling the Messy Edges
Real fleets are never fully clean. Some meters will not report through a modern feed, and some historical usage will only exist on statements. Bill digitization helps here by turning PDF and paper bills into the same structured data as your interval feeds, so a gap in machine-readable reads does not become a gap in the record. Feeding digitized bill data through the same normalization and delivery path keeps your dataset whole and your customers seeing one consistent picture.
It also helps to make gaps visible rather than silent. When a meter drops out, the downstream consumer should be able to tell that a period is incomplete instead of mistaking a hole for zero usage. Clear handling of gaps, timestamps, and identity is what separates a trustworthy feed from a merely large one.
Get Started
EZGB collects consumption and interval data through authorized connections and bill digitization, standardizes it into a consistent format, and delivers it to your customers and analytics tools by API, CSV, or SFTP, so a large and varied meter fleet turns into one clean, dependable feed. If you run submetering or metering infrastructure and want to spend less time wrangling formats and more time delivering data, book a walkthrough or start a pilot from the pricing and signup pages at ezgb.ca.
If you are earlier in the process and still deciding whether a building needs submeters at all, start with what submetering is and when a building needs it, which covers the licensing and billing side in Ontario before the data work begins.
Sources
- Green Button Standard and NAESB ESPI technical information: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/technical-info
- Understanding Electricity Unit Sub-Meter Providers (USMP), Ontario Energy Board: https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/oebs-consumer-protection-role/understanding-electricity-unit
- Green Button Standard overview, Green Button Alliance: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button
Source: greenbuttonalliance.org