Energy Monitoring and Metering Christchurch
Most businesses know what their power bill is. Very few know what it is made up of.
One number at the end of the month tells you nothing about which line, which building or which machine is responsible for it, whether something has been running that should not be, or whether the upgrade you paid for last year actually did anything.
We install monitoring that answers those questions.
What it does
Shows you where the power goes. Metering at circuit or distribution board level tells you what each part of a site actually draws, by hour and by day, instead of one figure for everything.
Catches faults before they become breakdowns. A motor pulling more than it used to, a phase drifting out of balance, a heater that never switches off. These show up in the data weeks before they show up as a failure.
Splits costs properly. If you have tenants, separate operations, or a building shared between uses, sub-metering means you bill on what was actually used rather than on floor area and an argument.
Proves the payback. If you put in solar, LED lighting or new plant, monitoring is what tells you whether the saving was real. Before and after, on the same meter.
Beyond the switchboard
Not everything worth monitoring is electrical. We also build monitoring for the things around a site that cause problems when nobody notices them: tank and silo levels, temperatures, pump run hours, plant that should have stopped and has not.
For sites where running a cable is impractical, we use long range wireless sensors that report back to a gateway, which handles distances of a couple of kilometres across a farm or yard without touching your Wi-Fi.
Recent work has included radar level sensors across a bank of grain silos reporting over LoRaWAN, harmonic logging on a school switchboard as part of a mains upgrade, and an energy monitoring proposal for a Canterbury brewery.
How the data reaches you
The data lands on a dashboard you can open on a phone or a laptop, with alerts for the things you actually want to be told about. We would rather set up three alerts that matter than twenty that get ignored.
Where it suits the site we can run the whole stack locally so your data stays on your own hardware and keeps working if the internet drops.
Where to start
You do not have to instrument everything at once. The usual starting point is the main incomer and the three or four biggest loads. That is normally enough to find the obvious waste, and it tells you whether going further is worth it.
Contact us and we can talk about what you are trying to find out.