Case study·Education & Campus·Cork, Ireland

Sub-metering a campus, gamifying the savings

University College Cork installed Advisor to meter electricity, gas, heat and water across more than 30 of its buildings. Beyond visibility, the system used gamification to engage building users — turning consumption data into friendly competition that drove energy down across the campus.

Sector

Higher education

Where

Cork, Ireland

Engagement

Campus-wide sub-metering via Advisor

The win

Gamification-driven reductions

At a glance

University College Cork installed Advisor to sub-meter electricity, gas, heat and water across over 30 of its buildings. With a complex campus estate and a broad community of building users, UCC needed both the data to manage consumption and a way to engage the people who actually drive it. Advisor delivered the metering — and used gamification to turn that data into measurable, campus-wide reductions.

CustomerUniversity College Cork
SegmentHigher education campus
Estate30+ buildings
UtilitiesElectricity, gas, heat & water
ApproachSub-metering + Advisor dashboards
EngagementGamification of consumption data

University College Cork's historic Quadrangle building, with its landmark clock tower, viewed across the lawn. — UCC’s Quadrangle — one corner of a campus estate spanning 30+ buildings, now sub-metered end to end.

01The brief

A complex estate, and people to engage

A university campus is one of the harder energy environments to manage: dozens of buildings, mixed uses from lecture halls to laboratories, and consumption shaped daily by thousands of students and staff. Managing that requires granular measurement across multiple utilities — not a single headline meter.

UCC needed to sub-meter electricity, gas, heat and water building-by-building, and then do something more difficult than measurement: get the campus community to care about the numbers and act on them.

02What we did

Meter everything, then make it a game

Granular sub-metering gave the energy team the data; gamified dashboards gave the campus a reason to use it.

Multi-utility sub-metering. Electricity, gas, heat and water metered across 30+ buildings, feeding a single Advisor view of campus consumption.
Building-level visibility. Per-building data made it possible to compare, rank and target the buildings with the most to gain.
Gamification. Advisor dashboards turned consumption into friendly competition between buildings — engaging users and rewarding reductions.
Measurable campus-wide impact. Engagement plus data drove down energy consumption across the campus, not just in a single pilot building.

Sub-metering tells you where the energy goes; gamification makes people care. Put the two together across a campus and the reductions compound.
Lead Engineer, Full Stack Energy

03The outcome

Reductions that stuck across campus

Sub-metering across 30+ buildings gave UCC the granular picture it had been missing, while gamification through Advisor dashboards drove measurable reductions in campus-wide energy consumption. Crucially, the savings came from engagement as much as engineering — building users could see their impact and compete to improve it.

The combination — accurate per-building data plus a reason for people to act on it — is what made the reductions durable rather than a one-off campaign.

30+

buildings sub-metered

4 utilities

electricity, gas, heat & water

Campus-wide

measurable consumption reductions

Get in touch

Engage your whole estate

Granular sub-metering plus dashboards people actually want to use is how campus-wide reductions stick. Let's talk about your buildings.

Explore Advisor →Talk to us

More Advisor case studies

Case study · Public SectorCork County CouncilFirst local authority in Ireland to achieve ISO 50001.Case study · HospitalityWoodlands Hotel30% reduction in night-time energy usage through out-of-hours analysis.Case study · BankingBank of IrelandFirst financial institution in Europe to achieve ISO 50001.