Chellow - Open Source Energy Bill Management software
Overview
Chellow is an Open Source Energy management application developed for checking both half hour and non half hourly electricity bills.
Users can download Chellow and run it themselves - or Meniscus host it on our own servers and offer the application as part of an electricity bill checking and data validation
Bureau Service where we run and manage the application for you.
So what does Open Source mean?
Well essentially it means that the software is available for your use ......at no charge. You can use the software for your own purposes but you cannot sell it as your own software. All licensing is undertaken under a GNU General Public License (GPL).
Thats the good bit... the not so good bit is that Open Source software requires users to contribute to its development. There is a development forum for Chellow and this, and the links to the software on the Sourceforge website, can all be found at the Chellow wikispaces website.
Physical Model of the software
Chellow holds a physical model of an organization's supplies containing all the information necessary to check bills including:
- Many-to-many mapping of sites and supplies.
- Supplies connected to generators (CHP, Load Management, Turbine).
- Supplies connected to the public distribution system.
- MPANs associated with each supply, together with their Agreed Supply Capacity. From the MPAN, Chellow works out: Voltage Level, Import / Export, Profile Class and Distribution Area.
- Chellow holds a history of the state of each supply.
- Half-hourly data (including kVAr, kWh, import and export)
The data can be uploaded using CSV files or entered manually using web forms.
A general philosophy behind Chellow is that any data entered is immediately checked for internal consistency with data already in Chellow. Inconsistent header data is immediately rejected, and errors in hh data are held in a dynamic list.