Utility monitoring and safety automation
Energy, solar, water, gas and oxygen were all logged by hand, across equipment from vendors who agreed on nothing. We integrated the lot onto one platform — and put real-time alerting on the readings where a delay is a safety problem.
- utility streams on one platform
- 5utility streams on one platform
- meter vendors integrated
- 4meter vendors integrated
- manual reports still prepared by hand
- Zeromanual reports still prepared by hand
The client is not named on this page. The work, the numbers and the technical detail are described exactly as delivered.
The problem: everything measured, nothing connected
This site was already metered. Energy, solar generation, water across effluent and sewage treatment, borewells and the canteen, gas detection, oxygen in the foundry tunnels — all of it instrumented. What it did not have was any of that arriving anywhere automatically.
Manual logging across every utility
Energy, solar, water, gas and oxygen were all recorded by hand, producing records that were slow to produce and inconsistent to compare.
A team doing data entry
The utility team spent its day on entry and report preparation rather than on the work only they can do.
Safety readings without alerting
Gas leaks and oxygen drops in storage areas and underground tunnels had no real-time detection. On these two readings, a delay is not an inefficiency.
No centralised environmental view
Nothing brought the metrics together, which limited both the response to energy inefficiency and the ability to answer an audit.
Mixed-vendor protocol chaos
Devices came from different vendors following non-standard communication protocols, which is the usual reason a site like this stays manual.
The system we built
Most of the engineering here is at the left-hand edge. Once every device is speaking, the platform work is straightforward — getting them to speak is the project.
Field devices
- Solar PVRS485 / SunSpec
- Energy metersModbus, per-vendor registers
- Flow metersRS485 — ETP, STP, borewell, canteen
- Gas detectionvia Delta PLC
- Oxygen sensorsfoundry tunnels
Acquisition
- Protocol-aware gatewayvendor register mapping
- Custom PLC mappingsfor the safety loop
Platform
- Thing Platformingestion + rules
- PostgreSQLhistory
Output
- Real-time dashboardsall five streams
- Safety alertsgas leak, O₂ drop
- Periodic reportsESG and audit ready
- 1
Solar over SunSpec
Solar PV systems connected using RS485 and SunSpec, so clean-energy generation is measured on the same platform as consumption rather than in the inverter vendor’s portal.
- 2
Per-vendor Modbus register mapping
Energy meters from ELMeasure, Rishabh, Schneider and Delta each have their own register layout. We configured them individually — there is no shortcut, and this is exactly the step that keeps sites manual.
- 3
Water across the whole site
RS485 flow meters across effluent treatment, sewage treatment, borewells and the canteen, giving usage tracking that covers the site rather than the main line.
- 4
Gas and oxygen safety loop
Gas detection sensors linked through a Delta PLC with custom mappings for real-time leak alerting, and continuous oxygen monitoring in the underground foundry tunnels.
- 5
One platform underneath
Everything pushes to Thing Platform and PostgreSQL, powering real-time dashboards, periodic reports and the alerting rules from a single record.
What changed
Real-time consumption visibility
Energy, solar and water usage are monitored live, which is the precondition for optimising any of them.
Audit and ESG data on demand
Environmental data is available when asked for, rather than compiled in the week before it is due.
Instant gas leakage alerts
Detection reaches a person immediately, which is the entire point of having the sensor.
Continuous oxygen monitoring
Enclosed, high-risk areas are watched constantly rather than checked periodically.
Manual reporting eliminated
The utility team got its day back.
Deployed on existing infrastructure
Rapid rollout with minimal disruption, by integrating the equipment already installed instead of replacing it.
Protocol work is the unglamorous half
Nobody buys a monitoring platform because it speaks Modbus. But a site with five vendors of energy meter, a PLC-mediated gas loop and a solar inverter talking SunSpec does not have a dashboard problem — it has an integration problem, and the dashboard is what you get afterwards.
Eight years of this is why we are comfortable quoting a site before we have seen the equipment list.
Meters everywhere, data nowhere?
If your site is already instrumented and the readings still arrive on a clipboard, the gap is protocol integration. Tell us what equipment you have and who made it.