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Compressed Air and Compressor Monitoring
Compressed air is the most expensive utility on most sites, and usually the least measured. We monitor the compressor house in kilowatts, cubic metres and bar.
Most sites do not know what happens in the compressor house
The compressor house usually runs on a single meter — often on no meter at all. The electricity bill shows a total, while these questions stay open:
- How many kilowatts does each cubic metre of air cost us?
- When production stops — overnight, at weekends — are we still making air? How much?
- Is there a leak? How large, and on which line?
- Does the set pressure genuinely need to be that high?
- Where do the compressors sit against the manufacturer’s published performance?
While those questions stay open, saving in the compressor house is guesswork. And spending based on guesswork is either never approved, or aimed at the wrong place.
The one chart that starts every conversation
Production stops on Friday evening. Flow does not. Whatever the system consumes while nothing is being made is, by definition, leaking — and on most sites nobody has ever put a number on it.
That shaded area is the entire argument for measuring compressed air. It is also the cheapest thing on a site to fix.
Where does your compressor sit against its datasheet?
A compressor’s real performance is not its rated power. It is the energy it spends per unit of air produced — kWh/m³. We calculate that continuously and hold it against the manufacturer’s published figure.
There is a subtlety here that is easy to get wrong. Datasheet values are quoted at specific working pressures. Applying a figure published for 7 bar to a machine running at 8.5 bar flatters the machine and misleads you. We scale the comparison to your own set pressure.
The result reduces to a single sentence: this compressor is running this far above, or below, where it ought to be.
What we measure, and from where
Measurement plate
- Active power
- kW
- Separate analyser per compressor · Modbus RTU
- Flow
- m³/h
- Compressor outlet and each main line
- Pressure
- bar
- Outlet and the furthest point of use
- Load / unload
- state
- Compressor operating regime
- Specific energy
- kWh/m³
- Derived · scaled to set pressure
- Pressure drop
- ΔP bar
- Derived · between two pressure points
“Leakage” is not a single number
Most reports hand you one leakage percentage. That percentage does not tell you what to do next. We answer two separate questions with two separate methods.
How much? — Non-production load
When production has stopped completely, every cubic metre consumed is a leak. We detect those windows automatically — weekends, shift gaps, shutdowns — and measure what the compressors are actually producing during them. That is a direct measurement of total system leakage, not an estimate.
Where? — Line-by-line breakdown
Flow meters on the main lines separate out which branch the loss sits on. “The factory has a leak” becomes “this line is losing this many m³ per hour.” That is an address the maintenance team can walk to.
Raising the set pressure does not fix it. It raises the bill.
There is a pattern we see on site after site. Machines at the end of a line are not getting enough pressure, so the compressor’s set pressure gets turned up. The symptom disappears and the cost becomes permanent.
The real fault is usually not in the compressor at all. It is the pressure drop between the compressor outlet and the point of use — a blocked filter, an undersized run of pipe, an oversized dryer. We measure that difference continuously. Where ΔP is high, the correct intervention is at the filter or the pipework, and the set pressure can come back down.
Every 1 bar of unnecessary set pressure costs roughly 6–7% in compressor energy. On a compressor house running continuously, that is not a rounding error.
Alerts that are worth reading, and savings that are proven
Crude thresholds — “flow exceeded X” — are useless in a compressor house, because what counts as normal depends on the hour. Our alerts are windowed: one threshold for a weekend, another for a running shift. Dead band and hysteresis stop a value hovering near its limit from firing the same alarm over and over.
The aim is not an alarm system the maintenance engineer silences. It is one they check, because when it fires something is genuinely wrong.
Verifying the saving
Acting on a recommendation is not the end of the job. We freeze the period before the change as a baseline, measure the period after it by the same method, and normalise the difference against production volume. That way “we saved energy” is not confused with consumption that fell because output fell.
Common questions
We already have a monitoring system. What would change?
Most monitoring systems show energy consumption. In a compressor house the question is not consumption but how much air was produced for that consumption. Without flow and pressure you cannot calculate specific energy, cannot size the leak, and cannot benchmark against the datasheet. If your existing system has no flow meter, that gap is exactly the difference.
How much saving do you guarantee?
We do not promise a figure before measuring. The potential in a compressor house varies enormously with leak rate, set pressure, the age of the machines and how they are sequenced. What we do is fixed: measure first, recommend from the measurement, then verify the result once the change is made. The number comes from your data, not from our brochure.
Does this help with ESOS compliance?
Monitoring is not an ESOS assessment in itself — that has to be signed off by an approved lead assessor. What it does is remove the hardest part of the work. An assessment needs twelve months of energy data, and the scheme now expects an action plan followed by reporting on progress against it. Both of those need measurement you can stand behind. The alternative route is full ISO 50001 certification covering your energy use, which the same measurement layer supports. The Phase 4 compliance deadline is 5 December 2027, and the qualifying data has to already exist by then.
Where is our data held?
In Finland, inside the European Economic Area, in an ISO/IEC 27001 certified data centre. The UK recognises the EEA as adequate, so personal data moving from the UK needs no additional transfer safeguards. Panel and API traffic runs over TLS; measurement data from site arrives over TLS-protected MQTT. Authorisation is two-layered, by role and by site. Backups are daily and retained for 30 days. The data belongs to you: on request we export it in a machine-readable format or delete it permanently, and it is never shared with third parties or used in another customer's analysis. One point we would rather state than have you find: our support team works from Türkiye, which is a restricted transfer under UK GDPR — an International Data Transfer Agreement covers it. The full position is on our security page.
Can it run on our own infrastructure?
Yes. The platform can run on your own server or on a separate appliance we supply. In that model measurement and production data never leaves your network: no inbound ports are opened and all connections are outbound only. We decide the deployment model together.
Would we have to replace our compressors?
No. The system is installed around the compressors you already have and monitors them. That is rather the point — to see where the existing system is losing air before committing to new plant. On most sites the first gains come from leaks and pressure, not from a new machine.
Let us measure what is happening on your site.
In a one-hour call we look at your existing setup and set out exactly which measurement points are needed and what you would be able to see.