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Effective Energy Monitoring Tips For Your Commercial Business

All commercial and manufacturing businesses look for ways and means of reducing energy costs. But even before they begin to do that, they need to understand that they would be able to manage their energy consumption only when they understand how energy usage works and monitor it with regularity. If you are a commercial property owner or manage a manufacturing unit and want to reduce energy costs in your business, here are some effective energy monitoring tips to get you started.

Cost cutting requires smart planning

Most businesses now recognise the importance of switching to energy-efficient lighting solutions, appliances and equipment. But this is more a part of the overall cost-cutting measures they incorporate on their properties to keep track of what is being used and how. Manufacturing units seek to save costs by reducing their spend on raw materials needed in the production work and seek out the best pricing.

However reducing energy costs isn’t as easy as switching to LED lighting or switching off lights in areas that aren’t being used etc. Energy can’t be accounted for in the same manner that various other consumables in a commercial setting/raw materials in a manufacturing setting can be.

The challenge with cutting energy costs

Power bills go to personnel in the accounts department who don’t really assess, check or identify what is being spent where. Their job is only to cut checks and that is what they do. Even in cases where the manager looks at the energy bill, there are no details as to exactly where the power was used.

Increasingly, utility providers are pricing energy based on the times of the day when it’s used. Sometimes, they may also penalise the customers that excessed the cap for a billing period; overall, there has also been a significant increase in the energy costs to meet the rising demand from various industries and commercial establishments.

Aside from this, utility companies are now also offering attractive incentives to customers that agree to cut down their usage. This means, commercial establishments and manufacturing units can benefit from curbing their energy consumption.

Some of the things you need to focus on are:

#1 Gather sufficient data before you try to manage anything

Start energy monitoring in your establishment and gather real-time data that can be seen and analysed. This will give you visibility of the usage and when there is a spike in consumption. Once you have understood the overall usage patterns and which machines consume the most electricity, you can design a plan on how to manage that usage and improve energy-efficiency.

#2 Choosing the right hardware matters

Its best to opt for industrial/commercial-grade energy monitoring hardware; this will monitor, gather, as well as distribute energy data and information in real time. The monitoring system should connect to various power-related machinery and equipment such as load panels, utility meters and large-scale manufacturing machines, compressors, HVAC chillers etc. Make it a point to choose web-capable monitoring hardware – this will make it easier for you monitor and configure systems over the internet.

#3 A compatible software tool

This is necessary to aggregate the data which makes it easy to see, analyse as well as use. You can choose between local and cloud-based energy monitoring software. If all the data is very sensitive, you may want to choose the former.

Once you have all the monitoring equipment in place and have collected all the data you need, you can associate the operational conditions in your establishment or unit with energy consumption statistics. This can help the management in your facility/plant enact an effective energy management policy.

If you want to know more about our power products and services, don’t hesitate to contact us at KaRaTec Power Supply Pty. You can give us a call at 612 9808 1127. You can also fill in this contact us form.

Thanks for reading,
Karatec Power Supply Pty
612 9808 1127