Grant Engineering

The Background

Grant Engineering is a market leader in designing, manufacturing and supplying a wide range of highly efficient and reliable heating products. They have operated for over 30 years and are one of the largest heating companies in the UK and Ireland. They offer a range of award-winning boilers, including oil and wood pellet-fired boilers and several eco-friendly solutions such as solar thermal water heaters.

The manufacturing facility in Birr Co. Offaly in Ireland houses several heavy energy users, including state-of-the-art laser cutting machines and compressed air systems, which are essential for manufacturing boiler parts and other heating components. In a busy manufacturing environment, it can be difficult to know where energy use is going, leading to significant running costs for equipment. Opportunities for reducing energy use can also go unnoticed, and a lack of equipment-level energy use information compounds the problem.

The Answer

Grant Engineering is known for manufacturing highly efficient boilers and wanted to focus on improving manufacturing efficiency. They decided that installing an energy management system would provide them with the information they needed to help optimize equipment operation.

EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics™ (formerly Wattics) installed an energy management solution to monitor electricity consumption in the facility’s two main areas: laser cutting machines, robotic arms, compressed air plants, painting plants, and administration areas.

The EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics solution dramatically improved the facility’s visibility of energy use and enabled Grant Engineering to focus energy-saving efforts on big electricity consumers quickly. It was found that the laser-cutting machines represented a significant opportunity for energy reductions, and effective shutdown procedures for the machines were adopted.

EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics helped Grant Engineering to identify that on a small number of shifts, the shutdown procedure for the laser cutting machines was resulting in a lower-than-normal power state. It was found that some shift supervisors were shutting down the machines using a different procedure which switched off nearly all ancillary equipment, such as extractor fans and lights

The Results

The EnergyCAP SmartAnalytics Dashboard can be utilized to assess the before-and-after picture for energy conservation measures. Grant Engineering initially successfully reduced the standby energy use of its laser cutting machines by 65%, and greater efforts helped to reduce this energy use even further. This was achieved by introducing new shut down procedures to be implemented by all shift supervisors.