How to access the handy usage data from your new advanced electric meter

By Jennifer Smith, Utility Customer Service Office Manager

We’ve been telling you for a while about all the great benefits of College Station Utilities’ new advanced electric meters. With installation across our service area complete, you can finally start enjoying the dividends.

The advanced meters record energy usage just like traditional meters but send and receive the data through wireless communications technology. That reduces — and even eliminates — the need for electric personnel to regularly enter your property.

The advanced meters also help CSU generate more accurate bills by reducing human error, better monitoring the system, less energy theft, enhanced reliability, and a faster response to outages.

But the best part is that you have easy access to information to help understand usage patterns, pinpoint the causes of high bills, and identify ways to save energy and trim your monthly electric costs.

The online CentraVu portal allows customers to check their usage in 15-minute, hourly, or daily intervals. That means you don’t have to wait for the bill to know how much electricity you’re using. Instead, you can see your usage patterns and peak times in real-time and compare them to the daily minimum, average, and maximum temperatures.

The portal provides this valuable data in easy-to-understand formats of your choice — graphs, PDFs, or spreadsheets.

Remember that billing is based on the first and last reading of the billing cycle, so the portal data may not precisely equal what you see on your bill. However, the portal data allows you to visualize your usage for specific date and time ranges, and estimates could be included for any interval.

Here’s how you get started (click on images to enlarge).

1. Log in to the bill payment portal.

You’ll need to create an online login if you don’t already have one. Thankfully, the single sign-on functionality minimizes the number of logins you must create and remember.

2. Click “View Electric Consumption” for the data usage portal.

3. Click Billing History.

This screen shows the customer the kilowatt hours billed, along with the total charges billed for electricity (excluding taxes).

You can explore your usage in several ways:

One way is to click Export Your Data, select your Read Interval, and then populate the Start Date and End Date.
Name the report, if desired.
Click Request Report.
Click Download.