Find the kilowatt-hours your utility bill is hiding
Your utility bill is one number describing thousands of loads. Energy monitoring breaks that number apart with submetering, showing which lines, departments, and machines consume what — and when. It removes the guesswork from every efficiency conversation: no more debating where the power goes, because you can see it.
Willowark meters what is actionable rather than everything that is meterable. The design starts from the decisions you want to make — allocating cost per product line, hunting waste, managing demand peaks — and works backward to the minimum instrumentation that supports them.
IoT & Smart SystemsHow the work gets done
The same way every time: scope, build, hand over.
Electric submeters go on feeders and major loads using split-core CTs, with Modbus or pulse-output integration pulling in existing utility and equipment meters rather than duplicating them. Gas, water, and compressed air metering complete the picture where those utilities matter — compressed air in particular is a notorious hiding place for cost. Interval data is aligned with your utility's billing intervals so demand charges can be analyzed honestly: identifying the fifteen-minute peaks that set your bill, and which loads could shift or stagger to shave them. Dashboards present consumption per line and department, normalized by production, because kWh per unit produced is the number that survives arguments.
Results are verified, not asserted. Baselines established before a change let savings be measured after it, in the spirit of formal measurement and verification. Demand alarms fire as consumption approaches a new peak — while there is still time to act — and off-shift baseline creep reveals compressed air leaks and equipment left running without anyone walking the floor at midnight.
Metering usually goes in over phases rather than all at once. The first phase is the mains and the handful of feeders that carry most of the load, which is enough to reconcile against the utility bill and to see which departments deserve a closer look. Later phases push meters down to the machines that the first phase flagged as large, variable, or unexplained. Existing equipment with built-in metering — VFDs, chillers, compressors, and many modern machines expose kW over Modbus — gets read rather than re-metered. This keeps the instrumentation budget pointed at loads where a number will actually change a decision.
Interval data is stored in a standard time-series database on your premises or in your cloud account, published over MQTT for other systems, and exportable in the formats utility programs and energy consultants ask for. The collectors keep logging through network outages, so a monthly total does not end up missing a day. Because energy data is only useful over years, the handover emphasizes longevity: documentation of every meter, CT ratio, and pulse constant; dashboards built on open tooling your staff can modify; and a short runbook for adding a meter, checking a reading against the bill, and re-baselining after a process or equipment change.
Scope it in writing
What we agree before work starts
- Metering plan targeting decision-relevant loads
- Submeter and CT installation design with contractor coordination
Build with checkpoints
Working results, not slide decks
- Integration of existing utility, gas, water, and air meters
- Dashboards with production-normalized energy views
Hand over something you own
Documentation, source, and training
- Demand analysis with peak alarms
- Baseline documentation for savings verification
Sound familiar?
Where energy monitoring systems earns its keep.
Allocating true energy cost per product line or per job
Compressed air leak detection through off-shift baseline tracking
Demand peak management to reduce utility demand charges
Verifying savings from efficiency upgrades with real data
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Related work
Radar centering system for steel mills
Components:
- Radar sensors (strip position): Non-contact radar reading strip edge position in a hot, dusty, vibrating environment where optical sensors fail.
- Edge controller (signal processing): Turns raw radar returns into a clean lateral offset in real time.
- Mill PLC (centering actuators): The mill's existing controller: receives the offset and drives the centering actuators.
- Operator HMI (live position): Live strip position for the operator.
Connections:
- Radar sensors to Edge controller (raw returns)
- Edge controller to Mill PLC (offset)
- Edge controller to Operator HMI
A steel-mill systems provider · Steel manufacturing
Radar-based centering system for steel mills
End-to-end engineering of a radar sensing system that measures and centers material on steel mill lines — from equipment assessment through hardware selection, electrical engineering, software, installation, and commissioning.
Read the case study →Common questions
Asked before every energy monitoring systems project.
How granular should the metering be?
As granular as the decisions require, and no more. Feeder-level metering answers most cost-allocation and waste-hunting questions at reasonable cost; circuit-level makes sense on your largest or most suspicious loads. We typically start with mains plus major feeders, then extend only where the data points somewhere interesting.
Can the system use our existing utility meter?
Usually. Many utility meters expose pulse outputs or interval data your utility can provide, and existing equipment meters with Modbus interfaces integrate directly. Reusing what is already installed lowers cost and, importantly, keeps your numbers reconcilable against the bill you actually pay.
What kind of payback should we expect?
We will not quote a universal number, because payback depends on your rates, demand charges, and how much waste is actually there — that is precisely what monitoring reveals. What we can say structurally: facilities with significant demand charges, compressed air, or multi-shift operations tend to find actionable waste quickly, and the monitoring itself tells you whether each fix worked.
Can energy monitoring help with utility incentive or rebate programs?
Often, indirectly. Many utility and state efficiency programs require measured baselines and verified savings, and interval data from submeters is exactly the evidence they ask for. We are engineers, not program administrators, so we do not manage applications — but we design the metering so the data meets the measurement-and-verification expectations those programs typically have, and we can work with your consultant or utility representative on what to instrument. Check your specific program's rules before relying on this.
Does the system work with solar, batteries, or a generator on site?
Yes, and it gets more useful when they exist. Bidirectional meters at the point of interconnection show import and export separately; production meters on the inverter or generator output show what each source contributed; and the dashboards net them so you can see true site consumption, self-consumption of solar, and how a battery is actually being dispatched against demand peaks. Most inverters and battery systems expose their own data over Modbus or an API, which we pull in alongside the meters.
Where this sits
Energy Monitoring Systems, inside a iot & smart systems system.
The lit component is the part of the system this service delivers; the rest is what it has to work with.
Hover or focus a component to see what it is and what it talks to. Arrow keys move between them.
Field sensors report through an edge gateway to a broker; a time-series store feeds dashboards, and rules raise alerts that reach a person.
Components:
- Sensors (field): Temperature, vibration, level, current — wired or wireless.
- Edge gateway (DIN rail): Reads the sensors, buffers when the link is down, speaks MQTT upward.
- MQTT broker: Pub/sub hub; many gateways, many consumers.
- Time-series store: Every reading, retained for the trend and the audit.
- Rules engine (thresholds): Thresholds, rates of change, missing-heartbeat detection.
- Dashboard: Live and historical views.
- On-call phone: The alert reaches someone who can act.
Connections:
- Sensors to Edge gateway over Modbus
- Edge gateway to MQTT broker over MQTT
- MQTT broker to Time-series store over MQTT
- MQTT broker to Rules engine over MQTT
- Time-series store to Dashboard over REST
- Rules engine to On-call phone over push
Strategy. Software. Systems.
Have a system that should exist?
Tell us what your operation is doing manually, what isn't connected, or what you're trying to build. We'll tell you plainly whether and how we can help.