Energy monitoring for manufacturing and industrial sites

A single incoming meter tells you what the whole factory used last week. It does not tell you which line, which compressor or which chiller used it. Purely Insights adds wireless and clip-on sub-metering at circuit, sub-circuit and asset level wherever it is installed, so the load behind an expensive half-hour resolves to a named piece of plant rather than a guess. Refrigeration and compressed air are the usual candidates on a process site, because both drift quietly and neither announces itself on a monthly invoice.

One published example runs like this. A food and drink manufacturer on a single site, 12 GWh of electricity, put sub-metering on three production lines. The data isolated a refrigeration setpoint drift that had been invisible inside the site total. It was fixed in one shift and baseload came down 11 percent year on year. Purely supplies, installs and owns the sensors: the hardware stays on Purely's balance sheet, the data is yours, and there is no lease and no capex.

On a manufacturing site the number that matters first is what the plant draws when nothing is being made. Purely Insights runs anomaly detection on weekend usage, overnight spikes, missing reads and holiday baselines, so a compressor left online through a shutdown or a chiller that never steps down gets flagged instead of being absorbed into the monthly total. Consumption is weather-adjusted using heating and cooling degree days, which matters on a site where refrigeration load and space heating both move with the season and a raw year-on-year comparison would mislead.

Industry-typical baseload ranges are published for offices and schools at 15 to 25 percent of total kWh, with anything above 35 percent usually pointing to a building management system schedule or always-on plant. Those are industry ranges rather than Purely measurements, and a process site with continuous plant will sit higher by design. The comparison that earns its keep is your own site against its own shift calendar, then site against site across the portfolio using quartile and outlier views.

Energy per unit produced is the number a plant manager will act on, and it needs both data sets in the same place. Purely Insights holds the consumption side at half-hourly resolution, with hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual aggregations and drill-down to a single half-hour. It exports to CSV, Excel, PDF and board-pack PDF, and offers a read-only JSON API on request that finance, BI, ESG and building management systems can read, so your own output volumes can be divided into the same half-hours the meter recorded.

The same route already exists on the industrial side. A cold storage operator with four sites and 18 GWh of electricity fed the Insights API into the Flex desk model, moved tranche cadence from monthly to weekly and finished £74k ahead of the prior strategy. A manufacturer with a heavy, shaped load can do the same: the shape of the consumption, not just the annual total, becomes an input to how the volume is bought.

Monitoring only pays if it changes what you buy and what you are charged. Typocolor, a UK manufacturer, cut its gas bill by £22,668 over three years through Purely's tendered procurement. Alongside procurement, every invoice is validated line-by-line against the contracted rate each billing cycle. When an overcharge is flagged, the Purely account team raises the credit note with the supplier and chases it to ledger. You do nothing, and the credit, the date it landed and the reason all appear in the monthly reconciliation pack.

Peak-demand and DUoS red-band exposure is flagged before the charge reaches the bill, which is the only point at which a shift start time or a load-shedding rule can still change the outcome. Renewal-window alerts fire at 12, 9 and 6 months before contract end, and the recommendation shows wholesale, non-commodity, supplier margin and Purely margin separately. Scope 1 gas and Scope 2 electricity emissions are tracked on both a location and a market basis using the latest published DEFRA factors, refreshed annually.