Monitor Hut Data Story

The fryers were metered. The consumption behind them wasn’t.

A food production site running a mixed gas and electric process line knew exactly what equipment was on the floor. What wasn’t clear was whether the existing meters could actually isolate what each machine was using, or whether a genuine sub-metering gap was sitting underneath everyday production.

The situation

The site, a mid-sized UK food production facility, ran a mix of gas and electric process equipment across its production floor. Site-level utility bills gave a clear enough total, but the engineering team had no reliable way to see how that total broke down machine by machine.

That mattered most on the production line itself. Four gas-powered fryers and three electric bagging machines represented the site’s most energy-intensive equipment, but nobody could say with confidence what metering, if any, sat behind each one, or whether the existing infrastructure was even capable of isolating that data.

Before any monitoring conversation could move forward, that had to be answered properly.

What the site assessment found

• The four gas fryers had no confirmed metering at individual unit level, existing gas infrastructure needed to be checked before any sub-metering plan could be built.
• The three electric bagging machines sat on shared circuits, meaning circuit-level detail was needed before individual consumption could be isolated at all.
• No single view existed connecting equipment-level consumption back to the site’s overall utility data.
• The gap wasn’t a lack of appetite to monitor, it was that nobody had mapped what physical metering infrastructure existed before deciding what to add.
• Once mapped, the fryers and bagging line were the clear candidates for an initial pilot, the two areas where better data would have the most immediate operational value.

The insight

You can’t sub-meter equipment you haven’t physically mapped.

Most energy monitoring conversations start with software, dashboards, reporting, alerts. But on a working production floor, the real starting point is physical: what’s on each circuit, what gas infrastructure already exists, and whether current wiring or pipework even allows for isolated measurement. Skip that step and any monitoring plan is built on assumptions rather than the site’s actual infrastructure.

What we mapped out

Monitor Hut carried out a structured site assessment of the production floor, working equipment by equipment rather than starting from a generic monitoring template. For the fryers, that meant identifying what gas metering infrastructure already existed and what would need adding. For the bagging line, it meant reviewing circuit charts to establish exactly where individual machines could be isolated from the shared supply.

The result was a practical, prioritised metering plan, built around the equipment that actually mattered most to the site’s energy use, ready to move straight into a pilot rather than a lengthy discovery phase.

Why this matters now

Food and drink manufacturers are under growing pressure to evidence energy performance, whether through SECR, ESOS, or increasingly detailed sustainability reporting to customers and investors. That evidence is only as good as the metering infrastructure sitting behind it.

For sites expanding production or adding new lines, the same question keeps coming up: does the physical infrastructure actually support the level of visibility the business now needs, or is that still an open question waiting to be mapped?

Not sure what’s behind your own meters?

Get in touch to talk through what a site-level energy assessment could look like for your production floor, mapping the physical infrastructure before anything else.

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