Measuring electricity-use is one of the most useful measures of machine performance and efficiency, but this usually means installing hard-wired sub-meters in multiple areas of the plant to measure machines, either individually or in groups such as a production line. Monitoring individual machines is generally cost-prohibitive using sub-meters.
With the advent of wireless transmission technology, utility data — electricity, natural gas, steam, water and air — can be captured easily and inexpensively by tiny, self-powered sensors that are simply clipped-on over a wire's insulation and will transmit the data via wi-fi or cellular service to the cloud.
In the cloud, our system will store the data indefinitely, so you can compare different time periods, and will analyze it so you can understand how you are using and perhaps wasting energy and other resources.
Because they simply clip-on (and off), you can install up to 100 sensors to monitor 100 machines in a single day, which costs about 20-25% of the cost installing sub-meters.
SiteWatch 360 uses a LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) system, which operates on the industrial, scientific, and medical radio band (centered on 915 MHz in North America).
Typical ranges indoors are 300-900ft, depending on walls, floors and other obstructions, and outdoors about 1-3 miles, depending on signal optimization.
SiteWatch 360 typically takes measurements of energy use every 10 seconds and transmits the data once a minute. LoRaWAN is the ideal protocol for transmitting small amounts of data over longer distances. A large commercial building or an average manufacturing facility would probably need only one or two gateways to receive data from sensors and transmit it to the cloud.
In the end, the main value of SiteWatch 360 to most customers is the insight they get when they view the operations of a single machine or multiple machines in real time. This level of granularity and understanding is hard to achieve with other systems — in terms of time invested or cost of the system.
This insight can help save energy, save labor, speed-up all kinds of reports as well as improving maintenance and overall machine-reliability. SiteWatch 360 can monitor virtually ANY type of data in real-time (see larger list…). ALL data collected can be imported into our software for analysis, graphing, and reporting, as well as re-exporting to other platforms, if needed.
Machine Reliablity and Maintenance Intervals
In addition to energy savings, SiteWatch 360 can improve machine reliability and significantly reduce downtime. Few plants capture much detailed machine operating data to help plant engineers determine optimum maintenance intervals for various types of equipment, probably because there's no easy way for CMMS firms to capture the necessary data. A SiteWatch 360 system can fill this data gap and provide engineers with valuable real-time and historical operating information across many machines.
Maintenance intervals in many plants are typically calendar-based — i.e.: “we'll change the oil in the compressors every 6 months”. A better solution is to base it on running hours — “We'll change the oil in the compressors every 2000 hours” — but this doesn't take into account the loads on the compressor(s) for each running hour. It's one thing if the average load over a year is 40% and a totally different thing if its 85%.
SiteWatch 360 can provide a much better solution by using real-time operating information — especially load information — for one machine, or a production line, or a whole shop-floor, based on data that our monitoring system can capture on a continuous basis, since higher loading over a period results in more stress on a machine, often leading to shorter ‘Mean Times Between Failures’.