Real Time Energy Monitoring For Businesses: 5 Things to Keep In Mind

Commercial businesses and manufacturers should understand that they can control energy intake only when they could understand and monitor energy usage to reduce the energy costs. Here, we have mentioned five factors you need to remember for real time energy monitoring for businesses.

Get buy-in from the highest levels

It’s simple to turn to LED light bulbs or increase the temperature on the air conditioner, but real time temperature monitoring must start from the highest level. How can you encourage the company’s top executives to invest in energy monitoring? Few companies are currently set up to monitor their energy use. Power bills are normally sent straight to accounts payable staff, who don’t ask any questions and just cut checks. And if administrators review a power bill, it provides no information about when or where energy was used.

Utility providers are increasingly charging electricity depending on the time of day it is used, or penalizing consumers who surpass a billing period’s maximum threshold. Customers who agree to reduce their consumption under certain circumstances are offered incentives. These changes in pricing and demand-response provide smart businesses with substantial opportunities to boost their profits simply by paying more attention to energy use and costs.

Nowadays, larger corporations are establishing new positions to monitor the energy consumption. Individuals in these positions see energy as a variable expense that can be handled to the company’s advantage rather than a fixed cost. Though the ROI will be apparent later, it is worthwhile to invest now in knowing your energy consumption.

Manage after gathering data

It’s time to start collecting detailed data about real time temperature monitoring that you can see and analyze—once you’ve sold energy monitoring to your company. While an air-handling unit or compressor cycles are on, the data should be timely enough and detailed enough to see the spike in usage. It should also be accessible to all main energy consumers in your company, providing them with not only information but also inspiration to cut costs.

Most real time applications usually evolve into energy management applications. After all, if you know your overall use habits, which of your facility’s individual machines are the heaviest users, how your consumption fluctuates, and what types of improvements are required, it’s only natural to want to automate and manage these items to make your company more energy effective. However, the first step is to fully comprehend what’s going on. You wouldn’t change the manufacturing processes unless you had gathered evidence that supported your decision. It’s the same for your energy intake.

You can only start investing in automation hardware and exercising new types of control over your processes, computers, and systems after you’ve gathered and analyzed a large amount of energy-related data.

Pick the right hardware

Monitoring energy consumption in your home cannot be compared in anyways with the monitoring of energy consumption in commercial buildings. A detailed overview of total energy use is a good start, but it won’t give you the details and granularity you need to figure out which of your devices or systems consume the most energy and cost the most during the operation process. So you need to pick the energy monitoring industrial-grade hardware to gather real time data to monitor, collect, and distribute energy data.

You should be able to produce comprehensive reports and monitor changes in each asset’s individual power draw using the data you get from the devise you use. The real time temperature monitoring hardware should also be web-enabled and simple to set up.

Look into the software options

The hardware for energy monitoring is just half of the fight. To make your data easier to see, interpret, and use, you’ll need a software tool. Energy monitoring software has two options: cloud-based and local.

• Online companies provide cloud-based software as a service. The data is sent directly to the company where the authorized person can access them from anywhere using a computer or even through cell phones and other mobile devices.
• On the other hand, Local software can only be installed in individual computers or in your company server. In case of sensitive data, keeping it in-house is preferable.

Based on the chosen hardware, the software varies. So ensure that the hardware and software you need works together.

Recognize the goal of monitoring

Your ultimate goal is to reduce your company’s energy costs. Energy monitoring provides the data you need to link operating conditions to energy consumption statistics, allowing your plant or facility’s decision makers to implement successful energy management policies.