Why this is important

Reducing the costs is one of the primal aims of every company. In the last 10 years the electricity price has risen by 63% and it is expected to grow further. This article would answer your questions in details, step by step and of course with example, how SAYMON can help your company to reduce the electricity waste.

First of all we would like to share with you some statistics. In China the electricity consumption in 2016 was about 5 000 TWh which was more than a half of the worldwide usage, while Saude Arabia usage was less than 300 TWh. Total world electricity generation in 2016 was 24 816 TWh and increased by 2.2% comparing to 2015. You can get the full overview here. Reducing electricity consumption can not only reduce your company costs, but also make our ecology better.

Our experience

In the end of the previous year our partners provided us with the new Wiren Board controllers (controller for automatisation with fully Open Source Linux-based software). These devices are used for home and industrial automatisation and monitoring needs. It is universal mutli-purpose gadgets due to there modular architecture. Wiren Board 5 can be equipped with the following moduls: RS-232 interface, additional CAN interface, additional isolated RS-485, additional 1-Wire interface, different kinds of discrete outputs: SSR, FET, mechanical relay and others. You can learn more about the device here.

So we decided to make an experiment. As far as Wiren Board 5 supports MQTT protocol integrating it with SAYMON was not a problem. The only step was to plug in our office electricity box to controller to recieve and store the main information about electricity consumption: power, voltage, intensity and others. All data was sent into SAYMON by controller where user can see graphs for better understanding and analysis.

 

The graphs gave us the following information:

1. lights usage in office was about 2 kWh;
2. boiling water cooler usage is about 0,5 kWh;
3. coffee mashine usage for 1 cup of coffee was 1,2 kWh and the cycle lasts for 240 seconds;
4. laptops usage was so low, so we decided not to count it.

After this simple analysis of the received data we understood consumption of each unit and saw the ways to reduce the electricity costs.

(Visualisation in SAYMON WebUI: on the left – graphs on PC, on the right – mobile app graphs)

Results

As a result of online monitoring system implementation we created a financial model of changing old gas-charge lamps on new LED lamps. Ultima analysi: ROI (Return Of Investment) – 11 months and reduced for 25$ per month costs after.

All in all, reducing electricity costs is a long term process. But we would like to give you 4 steps to begin with:

1. Buy a controller. For example, Winer Board 5 (SAYMON can work with any other MQTT-enabled controller).
2. Plug in sensors into controller to recieve data.
3. Connect controller to SAYMON to gather for the further analysis.
4. Store statistics and make decision to change/repair any of controlled devices.

A few more things about SAYMON. Our system can alert you in case of emergency. For example, you set up SAYMON and it works for a month collecting data about your machine. The usual PC usage is 0.4 kWh (based on SAYMON statistics). One day the consumption reduces down to 0.2 kWh. That means something goes wrong: SAYMON immediately alerts a responsible engineer with a phone call, SMS or e-mail message.

So, what are the profits of SAYMON?

• Real-time storage of all parameters of electricity consumption: power, voltage, intensity.
• Centralized data storage in a public or private cloud.
• Fullscreen web-reports (scheme, map, dashboard, graph, real-time data visualisation and so on).
• Mobile app for the on-the-go control (iOS, Android).

• Access isolation system.
• Alert-system: set up the most comfortable way to be notified (phone call, SMS, e-mail messaging)
• Automatic processing in case of an emergency event.
• Simple math functions (average, sum, min/max, etc.).

In the end we would like to mention, that about 90% of entrepreneurs do not pay attention to business metrics, which one day could cause a critical problem for a company.

Metrics are the most important indicators of the business success. What is even more important – the accuracy of the received metrics.

Accuracy of statics influences on business decision. Decisions influence on customers. Customers influence on a company profit.
We know it. We provide our customers with the true data and government standard (GOST) proves it.