I often hear that "Energy audit costs money, but saves no energy". This is true and not true at the same time. Here is why: Any experienced plant manager knows that their plant wastes utilities. No shame in this. Every plant wastes energy. Few plant managers know where exactly this waste occurs and even [...]
Our South African colleague Craig van Wyk from VWG Consulting expressed a consideration very much worth republishing: if savings per unit are achieved and sustained in high-volume manufacturing, they keep mounting every hour of every day. Here is Craig's message: During my years in management in the high-volume manufacturing environment, prior to becoming a [...]
A mere 1 month after an Energy Management Information System (EMIS) project was postponed ‘due to other priorities’ our client’s plant has stopped for 3 days. About $500,000 lost in pre-holidays food product sales. Not to count costs of avoidable urgent repairs and value of lost trust from clients. Why did plant stop? Boiler [...]
A common way to determine energy intensity in manufacturing is to divide energy cost by production volume, resulting in kWh per car or m3 per pound of bread. This simplistic approach may hit energy manager where it hurts the most - at evaluation of completed projects. A good well-implemented project may show dismal savings [...]
It occurred to me that meters relate to energy monitoring in the same way as screws relate to birdhouses. How is that? Some manufacturing plants start energy management from installation of meters. Too often the process ends with meters too. However costly, this result is predictable. I will explain why on an example of [...]
Energy audit takes time and costs money, is it worth the effort? How do I know if it will uncover enough saving opportunities? To quickly estimate how much money can be saved on utilities, we have devised an express tool - Energy Management Score assessment™. EMS is based on a premise that the way [...]
Sam Hoff, president of Patti Engineering. suggests to start collecting data only after one has identified the problem. See IIoT project success: First identify the problem, then begin collecting data. I think he meant to say "problem area", because if you know what the problem is - you do not need more data, you need [...]
Slow production time is an opportunity to do that myriad of small projects that maintenance kept suggesting for years, but could never implement because 'production comes first'. Now is the time to do them. How to find micro maintenance/efficiency projects during slow time? When external resources are limited, what do we do? We turn [...]
Reduction of air exhaust from refrigerated room reduced cooling load and eliminated need for refrigeration plant upgrade
A perfectly efficient machines can still waste lots of primary or secondary utilities. A complex utility audit routinely uncovers how water, heat or 'cooling' can be reused. Hot water reuse at poultry slaughter house Two industrial poultry processing procedures were set in adjacent production space - vacuum pump and scalding. [...]
