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