Understand when and how you use energy

Knowing when and where you use energy helps you spot ways to use the energy you buy more efficiently and effectively.

Monitoring and measuring your electricity use is important. Simply recording and comparing energy use can reveal a whole host of potential problems as well as opportunities for energy saving.

Energy monitoring can involve anything from reading and recording the energy use from the electricity company’s main meter, to installing separate meters for important pieces of equipment or using SMART metering which gives an historic profile of energy consumption, hour by hour.

Energy monitoring in practice

The simplest thing you can do is to take more frequent readings, noting the readings on the various ‘rate’ registers (such as night and day). This should only take up a small amount of time each week or, ideally, each day.

By working out what you use and when and where you are using it, you can determine the following (as examples):

• How the usage changes each week as the seasons change
• If there are any changes in the proportion of night unit use
• How much you use per cow or per litre of milk produced
• Spot any unusual patterns or peaks in consumption

Taking this one step further you can meter major energy uses separately and record these in the same way. Milk cooling, water heating and vacuum pumps, would be good candidates for separate metering as these are usually the three biggest energy users.

Data from the Welsh project showed the proportion of total energy used by process to be:

• Milk cooling: 38%
• Water heating: 30%
• Vacuum pump: 20%
• Washing and water pumping: 6%
• Lighting and other: 6%

It is also important to highlight that simply monitoring and understanding your energy use does not create savings. It is the action taken as a result of the monitoring and analysis that will do this. Regular checking of performance following changes will give confidence to take further action.

Potential benefits

Statistics have shown that simply analysing usage data and tightening up on use can save between 8% and 12%, or £500 and £750 per annum for an average 200 cow dairy unit.

This type of monitoring and analysis has the potential to help you use energy more efficiently and to quantify the results of implementing any energy saving measures, but it can also help when reviewing energy contracts, checking billing, and analysing your usage profile against your day/night tariff. Always check your energy invoices to ensure you are being billed accurately and compare consumptions and costs with previous years/periods.