SIPe energy monitoring and display at Woodlands Court

Understanding our own energy use

Woodlands Court in West Sussex is home to Synapsys and our sister company Open Technology. The building houses our engineering teams, research and development department, as well as production and administration staff.

After introducing several upgrades to the new range of SIPe energy monitoring and display products, we decided to start monitoring our own consumption. It means we can now use our building as a living and working demonstration model of the extensive and highly flexible systems, as befits our position as leaders in the BMS communications interfaces.

Demonstrating the systems capabilities

The system used at Woodlands Court consists of a ModBus SIPe meter logger loaded with SIPe Vision firmware, a Schneider electricity meter with two pairs of clip on CTs (current transformers), and an M-Bus SIPe meter logger connected to the gas and water meters.

The energy or flow rate points from the meters are also configured into their appropriate groups, allowing the system to start tracking our usage of energy and utilities. SIPe can then produce a profile of this usage to highlight any exceptional usage patterns and help us understand our consumption.

Colleagues across our network can access this information to view our current energy consumption and performance. SIPe also has the functionality to display additional information such as configurable news feeds and local weather information..

Tangible results for targeting reductions

An energy usage anomaly was highlighted just a few weeks after installing the system. Our consumption at weekends was considerably higher than would be expected for an unoccupied building.

Further investigation revealed that as boiler heating turned off, immersion heating kicked in, using a substantial amount of electricity in the process. A few simple control changes were made and this has resulted in estimated savings of between £750 and £1000 over the winter.

The installation and implementation of SIPe at Woodlands Court has not only helped us to reduce our energy consumption and expenditure, it has started to give us an idea of our typical energy usage and additional information which we can use to further lower our carbon footprint.

Looking forward to a site wide energy monitoring system

The installation allows the teams at Leeds Metropolitan University to fully evaluate the SIPe energy monitoring system for future development of an Estate wide energy monitoring system that integrates with their BMS.

Future requirements will include energy dashboards displayed at key locations or through the site-wide information screen network. SIPe has the flexibility and functionality to meet these needs going forward and Synapsys Solutions and the team at Leeds Metropolitan University will work closely together to further develop the product to meet their future needs.

From behaviourable changes such as thinking twice about turning heating up, to hardware and control changes, having direct results of these actions accessible and visible is a strong motivator for everyone in our organisation to become more energy conscious.