Case Study - Cut Integration Cost by 75%

Executive Summary

Our customer in the energy management sector required more data for a building. We were able to reduce the cost per point by 75%. This allowed the customer to accelerate the rollout of the new project.

Problem

Our customer in the energy management sector required more monitoring points within a building. The pilot building was installed with a price point of 1200$ per monitor point. This was prohibitively expensive for rolling out the new project to other buildings. Bitformations was brought in to review the requirements and provide a recommendation on how to decrease overall cost of the rollout.

Solutions

Reviewing the information which was provided by our customer we were able to determine that the use of a LoRa network would provide a substantial lower installation cost. We were able to source wireless temperature sensors which were installed in the locations which needed more monitoring. The customer opted to use a private LoRa network which was a substantially lower cost of ownership compared to a managed LoRa network. The private network was set up using open source technology and was installed in their existing infrastructure with minimal down time.

Development was required for reading the LoRa data packets into their monitoring platform. Bitformations always likes to future proof the development we provide. The system is developed so that any new temperature sensors or other sensor types (for example leak detection) can be installed with no additional custom development by Bitformations.

Outcomes

Our customer was very satisfied with the development and rollout of the system. Bitformations was able to roll out to 6 more buildings in the project with an installed cost of 300$ per point rather than the pilot which was 1200$ per point.

The system was able to save in the first building 20% of energy within the first year.

Acronyms

LoRa - Long Range wireless protocol