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Multi-Tenant Energy Metering & Power Control

Overview

Operators of multi-tenant properties — worker dormitories, hostels, co-living and student housing, campsites, and market stalls — often need to meter and control energy per space: to track usage, curb wastage, allocate or cap consumption, and remotely cut power to a unit (for turnover, non-payment, or safety). This guide uses a dormitory as the worked example, then generalizes to other sectors.

RansNet delivers per-space metering, monitoring, and remote power control using smart circuit breakers aggregated by a per-floor edge router and centralized in mfusion — where energy sits on the same single-pane dashboard as the operator's network, routers, 4/5G and Wi-Fi, instead of a separate proprietary portal.

The Challenge

Take a worker dormitory with a few hundred rooms, leased to different employers or tenant groups. The operator receives a single utility bill for the whole building but has no way to see who consumed what. This creates recurring pain:

  • No per-room visibility — consumption can't be attributed to a room or tenant, so electricity is bundled into flat rent that over-charges light users and subsidizes heavy ones.
  • Runaway wastage — when power feels "free," air-conditioners and heaters run around the clock in empty rooms and the operator absorbs the cost.
  • Manual meter reading — walking hundreds of rooms to read meters is slow, error-prone, and impossible to do in real time.
  • No remote control — cutting power for non-payment, tenant turnover, or a safety fault means physically finding and flipping the right breaker in the electrical room.
  • Billing disputes — without transparent, timestamped data, tenants contest their share and the operator has nothing to show.
  • Fragmented tooling — energy, network, Wi-Fi, and CCTV each live in a separate vendor portal, so no one has a single operational view of the site.

What the operator needs, therefore, is: per-space metering, automated reads, wastage control, remote power control, defensible billing data, and a single pane of glass. The rest of this guide explores the options against these requirements and proposes a solution.

Metering Options

There are several ways to meter energy per room:

Option How it works Trade-off
Smart energy meter (per unit) A dedicated metering device per room — direct-connect, or CT-clamp for larger loads Monitoring only — cannot cut power without a separate contactor; needs enclosure space
Multi-channel energy meter One DIN-rail meter monitors many circuits at once via multiple CT clamps (branch-circuit monitoring) Lowest cost per circuit for monitoring; but no per-room control, and needs CT wiring + panel space
Smart relay + traditional breaker Add a switching relay behind a standard breaker More components, wiring, and failure points; metering and control remain separate
Smart circuit breaker ⭐ Breaker + meter + communications + remote switch in a single DIN-rail device All-in-one; drops into the standard distribution board; remote ON/OFF built in

Recommendation: use a Wi-Fi smart circuit breaker (SE-BR2T). It does everything the other options do — metering and control — in one unit that fits the existing electrical panel, making it the cleaner and more cost-effective choice at dormitory scale.

Where This Solution Fits

The proposed solution fits situations where utilities are bundled into rent or managed operationally.

Sector Fit Recommended approach
Worker dormitories, hostels, student & co-living housing ✅ Strong fit Wi-Fi smart breaker (SE-BR2T) + mfusion — capped-allowance / quota model with remote safety shutoff
Campsites, RV parks, market stalls, temporary sublets ✅ Strong fit Same — rapid, low-cost deployment; activate or isolate power per slot

Info

Where tenants are billed for exact metered consumption, local law usually requires a certified meter. That regulated per-kWh scenario is out of scope here and covered in a separate discussion.

Solution Architecture

The design uses one smart circuit breaker per room, one edge router per floor, and mfusion as the central dashboard:

  • Per room — an SE-BR2T smart circuit breaker in the floor DB board meters the room (V/A/W/kWh) and provides remote ON/OFF.
  • Per floor — an HSA-520R branch router acts as the IoT gateway: the floor's breakers join its Wi-Fi and publish to its MQTT broker. It backhauls to mfusion over 4G (or any available WAN).
  • Central — mfusion auto-discovers every breaker, maps it to a room, and presents real-time stats, per-room usage, and cost-allocation / quota billing reports.

Dormitory per-room energy metering topology — one SE-BR2T smart breaker per room connects over Wi-Fi/MQTT to a per-floor HSA-520R edge router, which backhauls over 4G/SD-WAN to the mfusion cloud for real-time metering, statistics, billing reports, and remote power control

Topology summary:

  • Each floor's per-room SE-BR2T breakers connect over Wi-Fi/MQTT to that floor's HSA-520R.
  • Each HSA-520R forwards its floor's data to mfusion over 4G/SD-WAN.
  • mfusion aggregates all floors into one dashboard, so the operator sees every room's consumption and can bill or switch power centrally.

No data loss on 4G/5G outages

The HSA-520R is store-and-forward: if the cellular backhaul drops, each floor router keeps caching meter readings locally (typically up to ~3 days) and uploads the full history once the link recovers — so no consumption data is lost. This keeps the metering record gap-free and billing defensible even on intermittent mobile links, a real advantage over meters that report cloud-direct and lose data during any outage. See IoT Integration.

Why Smart Circuit Breakers

  • Space saving in electrical closets — Fitting hundreds of standalone smart meters requires significant wall space and multiple heavy sub-panel enclosures. Smart circuit breakers fit directly into standard distribution boards (DB boards), in place of a traditional circuit breaker, keeping the electrical room compact.
  • Built-in power control — If a tenant group moves out, fails to pay, or violates safety rules, the operator can remotely shut off power to that specific room from software. A standard smart meter cannot do this without an expensive external contactor.
  • Fewer points of failure — Combining breaker, meter, and communications into one unit means fewer wires, fewer terminal connections, and a lower chance of hardware failure over time.

Smart Circuit Breaker vs Smart Energy Meter

Feature Smart Circuit Breaker Smart Energy Meter
Space required Zero extra space (replaces the standard breaker) Significant — requires large external enclosures
Hardware cost Moderate Low to high, depending on model
Labor & wiring Very low (standard panel wiring) High (extra CT clamps and voltage taps)
Control capability Remote ON/OFF (non-payment / safety) Monitoring only (needs separate contactors to cut power)
Maintenance Simple (single-device swap) Complex (multiple interconnected components)

Design Considerations

Validate these points before committing to a full rollout — they determine whether the design holds at scale and for billing.

Consideration What to check
Metering accuracy The SE-BR2T provides monitoring-grade metering — suitable for usage awareness, cost allocation, and capped-allowance or quota-style reporting. It is not positioned as a certified legal-for-trade meter; if precise per-kWh billing is required, confirm the necessary accuracy class and certification for the project (that regulated scenario is out of scope here).
Wi-Fi reliability at density The breakers use 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and sit inside metal distribution boards, which attenuate RF. At hundreds of devices this is the main reliability risk. Put them on a dedicated IoT SSID and VLAN, use a broad subnet (e.g., /22) with short DHCP leases to handle many persistent connections, keep each floor's client count within the router's limit, pilot one floor first, and position the router's antenna near/outside the panels. (Wired RS-485/Modbus is more robust for in-panel metering but is not offered by the SE-BR2T.)
Edge-router power resilience Put each per-floor HSA-520R on a small UPS so metering and comms continue during brief outages and are unaffected when a room's breaker is switched off.
Electrical scope & breaker sizing The SE-BR2T is single-phase, 2-pole, up to 63A. Three-phase rooms or common-area loads need a different device. For rooms with air-conditioners or other high-starting-current appliances, select the breaker's rated current to match the room feeder design, and have the final rating confirmed by the electrical consultant or licensed electrician.

Deployment

Step 1: Install Smart Circuit Breakers

Install one SE-BR2T per room in the floor's distribution board, replacing the standard room breaker. Wire it as a normal 2-pole breaker (screw terminals, up to 35 mm²). No CT clamps or external metering are required.

Step 2: Deploy a Per-Floor Edge Router

Deploy one HSA-520R per floor as the IoT gateway. Enable its Wi-Fi for the breakers to join, and start the MQTT broker:

mqtt start
mqtt sub secure/energy

The router subscribes to the breakers' topic and forwards readings to mfusion. Refer to IoT Integration for the collection architecture and Smartplug Sensor Monitoring Setup for the step-by-step device-provisioning pattern (the SE-BR2T joins the same way).

Step 3: Point Each Breaker to the Floor Router

On each SE-BR2T, set the MQTT server to the floor router's LAN IP and the topic to match the router's subscription (e.g., secure/energy). The topic is a logical grouping used for discovery and room mapping — use a name that is not easily guessable, but rely on Wi-Fi security, the trusted local LAN, and mfusion access control for actual authentication, not the topic name itself.

Step 4: Aggregate and Bill in mfusion

Once the HSA-520R backhauls to mfusion, breakers auto-discover (allow up to ~5 minutes). In mfusion:

  • Map each breaker to its room/tenant
  • View real-time voltage, current, power, and cumulative kWh per room
  • Generate per-room usage and quota / cost-allocation billing reports
  • Remotely switch a room's power ON/OFF when needed

Refer to Device Monitoring — Hosts for the monitoring items view.

Verification

Items to Test Command / Action Expected Outcome
Broker running show mqtt status on the floor HSA-520R Status shows RUNNING
Breakers reporting show mqtt status Queue shows readings; discovered sensors list the breaker MACs
Rooms in mfusion Open the router in mfusion → Items tab Each room's breaker appears with live V/A/W/kWh
Remote control Toggle a room's breaker from mfusion The SE-BR2T switches ON/OFF

Best Practices

  • One floor per edge router — sizing one HSA-520R per floor keeps each Wi-Fi/MQTT domain small and manageable, and localizes any single-router outage to one floor.
  • Consistent topic naming — use a per-site/per-floor topic convention so mfusion discovery and room mapping stay organized at scale.
  • Protect remote power control — remote ON/OFF affects live tenants, so make it role-based, logged, and governed by an approved operational procedure. For occupied rooms, define a clear approval process before any remote disconnection.
  • Underlay resilience — the store-and-forward cache (see Solution Architecture) already protects against backhaul outages on its own; for sites where metering must never pause, add Multi-WAN (e.g., wired + 4G) on the HSA-520R for a redundant path.