Environment in a production hall: ventilation and filters
Situation
The ventilation plant was sized for a fully occupied hall, yet production fluctuated far more – ventilation ran on a fixed schedule regardless of how many people and machines were actually working. The filters on a production machine, meanwhile, were replaced on a prescribed time schedule even though the machine did not run continuously.
Solution
Six sensor boxes in a 6,000 m² hall measure CO₂, temperature, humidity and dust by particle size. They are plug and play: they arrive preconfigured with their own SIM card, need no access to the customer network and practically no installation. A control unit collects the data and regulates the output of the ventilation units by the measured CO₂ – installing and configuring it takes under four hours.
How we read the numbers on this site: The figures in these studies come from people inside those operations – engineers and managers who dug the savings out of their own data. They are not audited or officially approved; companies do not publish numbers like these. That is why we do not name the customers, and why every figure says where it comes from.
Result
Ventilation follows actual occupancy instead of a schedule – the ventilation system’s electricity consumption drops by at least 15 to 25 %: the lower bound with manual regulation based on alerts, the upper with automatic regulation, as ran here. At the energy prices of the time that meant an annual saving of €115,500. And clogged filters show up as a sharp peak in the dust reading, so they are changed at the next planned shutdown. The cycle became roughly 2.5 times longer – that is, 60 % fewer changes a year – and the machine is no longer stopped outside the plan. The hardware costs €5,880 today.
Honest numbers
The investment is hardware at today’s prices: six sensor boxes at €650 each and a €1,980 control unit. Installing the sensors costs nothing – they are preconfigured and carry their own SIM card; the control unit is done within four hours, configuration included. The platform licence is not included. The electricity saving was calculated at the energy prices of the deployment period; at today’s prices it would come out differently. We deliberately do not put a euro figure on the filter saving – it depends on the price of your filters and how often you change them today.