Byington Steel Treating CEO Kathryn Byington isolated energy and water usage costs with submetering and monitoring systems. Photo courtesy of Byington Steel Treating, Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.
As one of the largest metal heat treatment plants on the West Coast, Byington Steel Treating Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., provides metallurgical services to manufacturers in the aerospace, automotive, machinery, and medical products industries.
The company’s operations range from heat treating, hardening, and degreasing to stress loading, failure testing, and freezing – all of which are energy-intensive processes. Giant furnaces, cryogenic freezers, straightening presses, and degreasing machinery at the plant operate for hours at a time during multiple shifts, consuming vast quantities of electricity, gas, and water.
The energy and water consumption costs must be charged to individual clients’ products. However, measuring and managing individual production costs using master metering – in which a single meter tracks all gas usage, another tracks all electricity use, and a third tracks all water use – was challenging for the company.
Also, like many industrial plants in today’s tight economy, Byington Steel management was seeking a way to manage the company’s energy and water consumption to reduce costs, thereby increasing profitability. Key to achieving this objective was understanding how much energy individual processes and production lines were consuming so as to assign the costs incurred for each client’s product runs accurately. Because the plant was master-metered, tracking usage at the facility level only, the company’s ability to zero in on its energy and water costs was almost impossible.
Plant managers also needed a way to identify inefficient processes and potential machinery failures to avoid costly downtime and optimize productivity. In addition, they wanted access to historical usage data for each piece of equipment and process so that the company could bid cost-competitively on new jobs and grow its business.
Byington Steel CEO Kathryn Byington determined that the company needed a way to isolate the costs of resources used during the processes, production lines, and runs.
Submeters, Monitoring Isolate Individual Usage
Byington and other decision-makers at the plant installed Leviton’s VerifEye™ series 2000 three-phase electric submeters and communications systems on several machines to capture, profile, and analyze electric, gas, steam, and water consumption individually on a real-time basis (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Leviton’s VerifEye series 2000 three-phase electric submeters and energy monitoring hub helped Byington Steel Treating capture, profile, and analyze its electric, gas, steam, and water consumption individually on a real-time basis.
“The VerifEye system lets us monitor our real-time energy usage to achieve our client billing, cost reduction, and profitability goals in an era of rising energy prices and tightening budgets,” Byington said.
The Three-phase Meters:
• Measure kilowatt-hours per machine.
• Enable production energy and water cost calculations for client-billable processes.
• Help identify inefficient equipment and optimize maintenance schedules.
• Help determine energy usage during peak periods to facilitate load shedding.
• Provide usage profiles that enable negotiating with multiple utility service providers.
The energy monitoring hub interfaces with the electric submeters and the plant’s natural gas, steam, and water meters to measure and verify usage data down to a one-minute interval.
The Energy Monitoring Hub:
• Pushes or pulls meter data to energy dashboards, kiosks, software applications.
• Interfaces with Leviton electricity, gas, steam, and water meters.
• Provides interval data from energy meters as granular as one minute.
• Integrates with third-party billing companies or site software.
• Provides instant online access to energy data from local or remote sites.
The submeters and energy monitoring hub were installed quickly and without service disruption to the plant’s operating environment, according to Steve Schmehl, the company’s maintenance supervisor. “The ease of installation of the VerifEye system, its accuracy, flexibility, and seamless integration with our existing IT infrastructure were truly impressive.”
The output data from the energy monitoring hub, in turn, interfaces with the plant’s existing factory automation system and integrates with its cost accounting system seamlessly.
Results
Today, Byington Steel can generate real-time energy and water usage data for each production process and client run (see Figure 2). This streamlines cost accounting and allows the company to invoice clients accurately. In addition, it enables it to bid on future projects cost-competitively.
Figure 2: Now that the new submetering and monitoring system has been installed, the plant managers and staff know exactly where and how energy is being used. Armed with that data, the staff can improve efficiencies, bill clients for the energy and water use accurately, and bid potential projects knowing what their resource input costs will be.
In addition, plant managers now have instant access to the plant’s historical energy usage profile and metrics so they can contract with any number of utility service providers to achieve greater cost flexibility and savings. They can also chart out and profile usage peaks and valleys for load shedding and cost avoidance during peak demand periods.
The company intends to install the VerifyEye Series 2000 submeters on its entire line of furnaces to enhance its plantwide operations.
“The system provides us with a way to know precisely where and how energy is being used and gives us a turnkey solution for billing clients,” Byington said.
Byington Steel Treating Inc., 1225 Memorex Drive, Santa Clara, CA 95050, 408-727-6630, info@byingtonsteel.com, www.byingtonsteel.com
Leviton Manufacturing Co. Inc., 201 N. Service Road, Melville, NY 11747, 800-323-8920, www.leviton.com/verifeye
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