A lot of businesses rely on heating systems in their day to day operations. With the energy prices of late, more and more companies look at how they can increase their energy efficiency on heating systems.
With the transition to more renewable energy, improving the energy efficiency is vital to successfully reduce emissions. Annually, over 120 million meters of heating cables are supplied for applications such as process heating and frost protection, and somewhere around 90 – 95% have no advanced control. The reason for this is that, up until today, there has been no focus on the energy consumption related to such systems, and there has not been any cost efficient solutions available on the market.
Many of our employees have a background from the oil and gas industry, where one would use electric heating systems on installations to ensure that the systems operate at optimum efficiency, and that people can work in a safe environment, regardless of the outside weather conditions”
Svein Erik Gregersen – Chief Commercial Officer in EQON
It was through this experience that it was discovered that having more advanced control and monitoring were challenging, and that a solution for this would create a huge potential for energy savings.
Often one would operate at 0 – 5 degrees Celsius ambient temperatures, but the systems would be energized as though it were 25 degrees below zero at all time. There were no good solutions to regulate this, hence a lot of energy would be consumed needlessly. It was this that lead to the innovating idea of creating a compact unit for control and monitoring of heating systems.”
EQON ONE Thermal Controller
The answer to challenge was the EQON ONE Thermal Controller, a compact unit which makes it possible to reduce energy peaks, and dramatically reduce the energy consumption.
The unit allows the user to seamlessly control and monitor all heating applications with resistive load. Relevant applications could be heating cables used in process industries, anti ice on walkways and escape routes, etc. In Norway the potential for energy savings are huge within the oil and gas industry, but also other industries which use electric heating cables, can save significant energy by using our technology”, Svein Erik explains.
Previously one would use relays to control the power and with would either be 100% on or completely off, where EQON use semiconductor technology to seamlessly adjust between 0 to 100% output. Field testing has shown that the energy consumption can be reduced by as much as 73%, compared to conventional systems.
We are also developing new algorithms based on machine learning, to be able to predict the energy need the next 7 – 14 days, based on available weather forecast. This will contribute to a more efficient energy planning and enable peak shaving of consumption, meaning that only the energy that is needed to obtain sufficient heat is used. This will save significant cost for our customers”, he adds.
Through our cloud based software EQON ONLINE, customers can get real time power consumption and condition monitoring of the heating elements, while seamlessly controlling the output. The unit can also be connected wirelessly, for a flexible integration into the customers systems, and can easily be scaled by adding more units.
