Schneider Electric Malaysia (Schneider) has launched a simple plug-and-play electrical monitoring solution for small to medium organisations. The solution that is free for a year, includes at least Schneider’s components like switches and meters, engineering expertise as well as a Web-based software application, a black box and accessories to enable wired or wireless connectivity.
Country President in Malaysia, Soo Pow Leong, admitted that their journey to help local businesses achieve more efficient energy management, began in 2014 when local electricity tariffs were raised.
The free electrical monitoring solution, is aimed at helping resources-constrained SMEs, track their real-time power conditions, minimise business downtime and improve their bottom line.
Important connectivity
Basically, what is involved is connecting switches to important installations in a business or factory like water pumps, chillers, fridges and so on. This enables visibility into the energy consumption of these various critical component devices.
Soo said, “Businesses then would be able to analyse the data to make better business decisions like the optimal time to do maintenance, optimising areas where they can save costs and being proactive about maintaining or replacing their equipment.”
There is also a nifty feature with the free software, whereby it would send out email notifications of the On/Off/Trip status of machines. For small food and beverage production facilities for example, that require constant power supply to big fridges and water pumps, this eliminates unnecessary food wastage and preserves profitability.
Target
Schneider Malaysia will target this service towards all segment of industries that rack up electricity bills of RM300,000, on average. Soo described that there is opportunity to reduce energy usage and ultimately the electricity bill for them.
The deployment which happens at the electrical distribution board level of a building, and across machines that are to be monitored, could cost up to RM100,000 at least. This includes engineering services, monitoring software, software integration and accessories that can transmit to the core part of the solution – a black box which is also included for free.
The whole solution is scalable, and can modularly grow to add more machines to monitor. A more advanced management solution could cost up to RM500,000
Soo claimed that Schneider Electric’s low voltage electrical components that connect and power business processes, are now intelligent, can provide useful data, and can be monitored.
