Projects
Product Case Study - Real Time Energy Monitoring
Products Used
LabVIEW | NI DAQ
The Challenge
Designing a system which could allow users greater understanding of their energy consumption with the aim of reducing their overall usage and wastage and give them the ability to react to any exceptional activity with immediate effect.
The Solution
Using National Instruments LabVIEW and an NI Data acquisition device to create a Real Time energy monitoring system with exception reporting mapping it against an ideal day and allowing them to see the usage of individual devices as they are turned on. The system has been saving customers an average of 20% on their energy bills and given the energy managers a greater understanding of precisely where there wastage and usage is occurring.
Introduction
With the government legislations coming into place and a worldwide drive in which to reduce our CO2 emissions a system was required to allow users a better understanding to be able to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. With this objective in mind we built a real time energy monitoring and management system bringing the information to users in a Real Time format so that they are able to see the consumption which they are using at that precise moment allowing them the ability to react with visible cause and effect rather than them waiting to see what they have used via a bill received on a quarterly basis.
Acquisition of data
The system can connect directly to an existing electricity meter or has the ability to use custom built power monitoring devices to allow for portability and sub metering and monitoring. The data is collected by National Instruments data acquisition hardware allowing room for extra monitoring channels and flexible acquisition speeds with the data being streamed up to our online storage database for analysis and reporting.
Internet communication for management reporting
So that the accounts manager was able to view historic data at any point an online data storage location was added, this gives the ability to look over previous usage for the same type of day months in the past and compare the same data set to manage a format of best practice. The database and system was setup over the web so that the usage can be viewed in real-time from any location to a PC or mobile device and gives the user flexibility to access all the data when creating their energy reports.
Smart friendly user interface for management reporting and real time data viewing
The user interface and reporting software was programmed using the LabVIEW graphical programming environment. This allowed for fully functional simple to use graphing features and a professional user interface to allow the user the ability to get the most out of the data being viewed.
The software allowed for simple features to be added making the user more aware of how electricity consumption worked so that it was displayed in a format that would encourage them to reduce they energy consumption habits.The National Instruments toolkits allowed us simple communication to both our web interface and our online database so that the data could be presented and retrieved simply and efficiently. Its file handling, html and pdf tools gave the ability to save the data in a variety of formats for reporting documentation to be created that could be tailored to the customer’s specific requirements. Its flexibility with other software platforms also allows us to incorporate software which when alarms where activated was able to fire of emails and text messages to the various energy managers.
The mathematical features of the LabVIEW software allowed the data to be handled and analysed so that heavy user devices could be recognised simply and that mathematical models could also be applied to the other data for more specific user detail capture.
By using the tools and techniques learnt from the NI Certification program a flexible and maintainable software architecture format allows features to be added quickly and efficiently and a particular user to manage a large number of sites and monitoring locations all from the same piece of software so that they can compare buildings and individual manager’s performances.
Additional Benefits
- Exception reporting allows the user the ability to set up events and alarms that trigger email alerts or text messages to the energy manager.
- Can be setup to monitor other features such as humidity and temperature.
- Ability to compare buildings in Real Time allowing for competition amongst energy managers.
The systems have now been trialled in a large number of locations across a range of industry sectors and has been employed as a major tool for reducing the energy usage in those companies. One large Marine shipping company trialling the system in a new building they had purchased, installed our system and overnight it reported that they had irregular device activity after office hours. The system was able to point out a phase angle management unit, which had been running incorrectly, adding to their power drain instead of reducing it and once removed saved them a hundred pounds a day on their energy bill, they are now using our systems across the groups various company locations.
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