Clever machine monitoring cuts costs by £78,000

Challenge

Alucast is an aluminium foundry in the West Midlands and a very high energy user. Like other manufacturers, Alucast was struggling with increased energy prices – its fixed rate was coming to an end, with prices going from £0.14 per kWh to £0.44 per kWh – a 300% increase in energy costs. It needed to reduce their consumption drastically and identify energy wastes.

One key area to focus on was to investigate the energy consumption of their machine shop and to see whether there was scope to minimise energy usage there.

Solution 

Sustainable manufacturing specialists at WMG suggested that Alucast should implement shut down periods over the weekends rather than leaving machines idle. A common myth with manufacturers is that by fully shutting down machines, there will be issues with restarting them again.

It then kick started a project to identify the potential savings and de-risk the process of shutting down machines both over the weekend and during the working week. Using a series of monitoring devices, WMG measured consumption of four different types of machines (17 machines in total) when left idle compared to being switched off.

Impact

Through its analysis, WMG discovered that over a two-year period Alucast could save 95,107 kWh in energy usage, which equates to £78,225 and 19,971 kg in CO2 equivalent, or the equivalent of driving 65,670 miles in an average car or driving around the world in a diesel car 2.86 times.

Tony Sartorius, Chairman, Alucast Ltd, said:

In the current energy crisis, the Manufacturing Energy Toolkit (MET) has been beneficial to Alucast, as we are a high energy user with three aluminium foundries. The team at WMG has helped the company reduce our energy usage, lower carbon emissions, and save waste.