CASE STUDY
Shockey and his team then moved their focus to natural resources and swapped out the main water feedpipe to the building with a narrower restricted flow pipe at the same time as introducing low-flow faucets to reduce overall consumption.
Lighting in the 90,000 sq ft shopfloor was next on the list and the existing 240v metal halide lighting was replaced with modern LED units – an investment that delivered savings to cover the initial capital expenditure in less than three years.
State-of-the-art monitoring
With the groundwork in place, the team has recently installed state-of-the-art monitoring software from Ndustrial, a real-time intelligence platform that enables companies to gain insight into their processes and energy usage.
By placing twenty plus monitors on electrical equipment at key energy usage points around the facility, the software provides consumption data to an online dashboard, which according to Shawn is already delivering a range of actionable insights.
“ One of the first things we noticed were peaks in power demand for the AC system throughout the day and that immediately makes you ask what’ s going on. You want to know what’ s happening at that time of day and what’ s causing the extra demand,” Shockey explained.
“ One thought we had was that because the warehouse is not air conditioned, perhaps the system was working extra hard at times to normalize the overall temperature. We thought we should do the math on this and find out if it would be more efficient to install another AC unit in the warehouse than pay the additional energy costs. Now we are bringing in an outside auditing firm to do the analysis and confirm our suspicion.”
Shockey and his team also used key data from the platform to discover that air compressors were being left to run over the weekend, wasting significant quantities of energy. They have now put into place new
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