The Texas LoanSTAR Program: Acquiring and Archiving LoanSTAR Data

Abstract

This paper discusses the acquisition and archiving of data for the Texas LoanSTAR monitoring program, an eight year, $98 million revolving loan program for energy conservation retrofits in Texas state, local government and school buildings funded by oil overcharge dollars. In particular we focus on the design, development and implementation of a state-wide computer network that communicates with field recorders installed in participating agencies, the development of public domain software for electronically polling the data acquisition systems (DASs), and the development of procedures to assess the accuracy of the data being collected. The development of a field data recorder testbench facility is also discussed. Such a facility is being used to develop and test software for polling DASs to be used in the program. In this report we also discuss data management and the process of acquiring data from a site, translating these data to a common format and preparing the data for graphic presentation or analysis. In the final section we discuss the lessons we have learned and our future work.