This is the first in a series of technical papers written todescribe results of ASHRAE Research Project 1544. Becauseof ASHRAE's limitations on the number of figures and tablesand overall paper length, it is not possible to present resultsfromthe research project inasingle paper. It is anticipated thatbetween 6 and 10 technical papers will ultimately be writtendescribing findings from the research. The first three of thesepapers have been submitted for simultaneous publication.Hot-water use in hotels and its associated energy use issignificant. However, information on hotel hot-water usepatterns has been limited until now, resulting in most hotel hot watersystems being designed using extremely old (45 to 80years old) hot-water use data that predate the introduction ofwater- and energy-efficient fixtures and appliances. In recognitionof this fact, ASHRAE funded Research Project 1544“Establishing Benchmark Levels and Patterns of CommercialHot-Water Use—Hotels” to both develop a monitoring methodologythat could be duplicated by others to collect hot-wateruse data from a larger number of hotels and to obtain updatedhot-water use information from at least two hotels.This first paper describes the technique used to locate andsolicit participating hotels, details about the hotels tested, andthe instrumentation, data collection approach, and equipmentused in the field test effort. Additional technical papers beingreleased simultaneously with this paper describe datacollected from two hotels tested, discussing similarities anddifferences. Those additional papers describe in detail theobserved hot-water use time diversity. Subsequent technicalpapers to be published at a later date describe a procedure thatwas developed for normalizing the results so they can beapplied to hotels of different sizes and with different types ofhot-water-using equipment and fixtures. This normalizationprocedure led to the development of a new hotel hot-watersystem sizing procedure, complete with design examples,which is also described in subsequent technical papers beingreleased at a later date. All of this information is included inthe project final report (Hiller and Johnson 2015).