Six Ways Energy Consultants Benefit from IoT Energy Management
With energy prices rising, energy management is a hot topic right now for businesses, homes and consultants alike. But why is IoT the right solution for consultants looking to make an impact?
In order to provide useful and customised advice to energy clients, you need comprehensive data. Yet energy data has at times been nearly invisible, difficult to interpret, or not granular enough. Often energy consultants spend their days collecting data, normalising data formats and chasing data suppliers, instead of using it to save their clients energy and money.
IoT monitoring systems can be used to track the energy consumption of a range of appliances, machines, buildings and spaces. They make energy management less complicated and more accessible.
GridDuck takes a look at how energy consultants can benefit from our intelligent energy-management system:
1) Get Granular, At-A-Glance Data
As an energy consultant, the biggest tool in your arsenal is comprehensive information and reporting that allows you to cut costs and reduce energy waste. GridDuck uses easy-to-install hardware that will monitor energy consumption across several sites, whether these are shops, cafés, pubs or offices.
It can also track the performance of several buildings clustered in the same area, such as a school campus. We helped one government agency track the electricity consumption of five regional offices in real time. All the readings go to a dashboard you control, giving you total visibility of clients’ sites wherever they are located.
Energy Management Across Regional Offices
If you’re working with a client who operates several appliances or machines, you’ll be able to compare their consumption patterns across the day. For example, you’ll be able to see how certain shifts affect energy usage.
2) Manage Electrical, Gas and Water and Integrate With Renewables
We can provide electronic, up-to-the minute readings of your gas, water and electricity consumption. You can download the data from our dashboard and compare it to your client’s energy bills and business activity.
GridDuck can also help you split utility bills among tenants who share the same space, such as in shared offices and dark kitchens.
Renewables? No problem. GridDuck enables you to track local renewables generation and adjust your client’s energy consumption accordingly. We track solar PV at a school, for example, and can charge and discharge a battery in response to solar generation.
3) Make Meaningful Comparisons
Clients can sometimes be reluctant to change suppliers or invest in energy solutions if they can’t see the obvious benefit to the business. IoT monitoring systems allow you to make before-and-after comparisons that demonstrate direct savings.
GridDuck worked with an organic apple farm in Hereford that was using two cold stores of different sizes. Even though one was larger than the other, both were consuming the same amount of energy. The farm has now scaled down the cooling unit of the smaller one. Our data gives our client accurate before/after comparisons, allowing them to see how this small intervention has saved them money and how much.
4) Write Better Reports, Case Studies and Proposals
A critical part of your job will be putting together reports for your clients, showing exactly how you’ve been able to make energy savings. This entails making complex information easier to understand. With our dashboard, you have powerful insights at your fingertips already, but you can also download the data or set up data feeds for further analysis in your own systems.
Our case studies demonstrate clear impact. One of our clients was a family-run fruit farm. Due to the business’s cold stores, electricity was a huge expenditure that was affecting the profitability of the business.
We installed some of our wireless hubs to monitor consumption and send alerts, which in turn enabled the farm to shift their operations, packing the cold stores at a different time of day. By doing this, the farm saving 45% on energy. View the full case study here.
5) Save Carbon, Save Money
As an energy consultant, part of your job is to help make a client’s energy consumption greener and more cost effective. As energy costs continue to spiral, any cuts you can make will likely have a significant impact.
In food retail, for example, refrigeration accounts for half of electricity bills on average, while lights account for 27%. GridDuck helps save costs automatically, every day.
GridDuck worked with a chain of cocktail bars in London to help them become more sustainable. We set up rules to automate their drinks refrigerators and, in only seven months, the bar achieved energy savings of 35% and a 100% return on investment.
You can use our system to automate heating, cooling and switch off lights - all remotely. Set rules that offer you more flexibility. If the temperature in an office rises to 20 degrees, for instance, you can set a rule to automatically turn off the heating.
Eliminating energy inefficiency not only helps your clients save money, it also helps them meet the government’s environmental targets.
6) Save Yourself Time
GridDuck works with busy people who need in-depth information fast. Troubleshoot problems quickly: whether it’s finding out which appliances are working inefficiently to spotting what parts of the business are wasting the most energy unnecessarily. The result? Better energy management that saves you time and gets clear results.
If you’d like to find out more about how GridDuck can help you, talk to one of our team. We’d be happy to give you a demonstration of how it works. You can also schedule a no-obligation, 15 minute Calendly meeting with Miles here.