Manufacturing

Smarter Technologies’ Energy Monitoring Equipment Saves Steeper Group Thousands of Pounds Per Year.

Steeper Group delivers world-leading technologies and products alongside responsive clinical services across the fields of prosthetics, orthotics, and accessible technology.

A collaboration between Royal London Investment Management, the landlord and their tenant, Steeper Group, resulted in the introduction of Smarter Technologies’ energy monitoring equipment to improve Steeper Group’s processes, lower their energy bills, and reduce their emissions by cutting wasted consumption. The partnership also contributes towards Royal London Investment Management’s ESG obligations and reporting.

Challenge

Monitoring Energy Consumption

To improve their energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint, the manufacturing group sought to better understand their energy usage. Previously, the company had relied on energy provider invoices for consumption data, causing delays and inaccuracies.

Process Consumption Testing

The company tested its 58-hour-per-week Regenerative Thermal Oxidizer, which incinerates solvent fumes from 16 factory processes. The Steeper Group team hypothesised that energy consumption could be reduced by isolating unused processes.

Process

Smarter Technologies installed smart electricity and gas monitoring equipment in the factory, with communications via Orion, The Real-Time Data Network™: a low power, ultra-narrow-band, secure radio network system. Orion offers powerful, intelligent decision support and management tools with APIs connecting real-time data to secure cloud environments and software platforms. The user-friendly management platform, SmarterView, allows Steeper Group to monitor their energy consumption data in real-time and access historical reporting and analytics.

Outcome

The real-time data provided through Smarter Technologies’ smart energy monitoring system meant the operations team were able to test hypotheses they had been developing and emphatically prove the benefit to the leadership team.

3,500 kWh of Gas Saved Per Week

By monitoring the daily consumption on SmarterView , Steeper Group noticed that gas was being consumed on a day when there was no activity on site and when the heating should have been switched off. Investigation showed that the heating program controller was not working, and heating had been running 24 hours a day. Fixing this problem resulted in savings of at least 3,500 kWh of gas per week—a fault that would have remained hidden had it not been for the live data provided by Smarter Technologies’ energy monitoring technology.

Savings and Lower Emissions

With access to real-time consumption data, Steeper Group were able to measure the effect of isolating different processes on consumption and found that they could reduce gas consumption by at least 40% by applying an isolation regime, which they plan to implement soon. The new regime will reduce gas consumption from 298kW per hour to an average of 188kW per hour, and electricity consumption from 38kW per hour to an average of 19kW per hour, resulting in significant savings and lower emissions.

Total reduced gas consumption.

Reduced energy consumption on process testing.

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