What is a Smart Meter?

Today’s complexity in the industrial field requires more efficient technologies and devices: and the same goes for those devices that measure the quantity and quality of resources used by a production plant.

That is why old meters have been takenover by Smart Meters: smart measurement and monitoring of consumption (energy, gas, water, etc.) solutions, that are able to communicate with the costs management and control systems of the machineries in the production plant.

Therefore, we can qualify a Smart Meter as an intelligent and open sentinel, which goal is no longer just recording certain data, but also to automatically communicate and transmit them.

Internet of Things: this is how a Smart Meter is born

Now that we have defined what is a Smart Meter, lets go back to understand how the necessity for such an independent device was born.

We don’t have to go far, in fact, it’s in these latest years that the need for an auto-configurable and auto-provisioning technology started.

That is when we talk about Internet of Things, a system in which monitoring devices are able to automatically communicate gained information and to access to data produced by other devices.

What does this tell us about Smart Meters? Mostly, that this devices, from simple information providers, have also become users.

We refer to them as prosumers, that is providers of data, automatically made available to users, and consumer of data, automatically obtained by other devices.

The importance of Smart Meters in industry

By introducing Smart Meters in the industrial field we have gained a more efficient data sharing system, with massive volumes of information.

We can see a clear optimization of the communication inside a production plant. And the greatest the volume, the speed and the quality of consumption data, the better efficiency of the infrastructure.

First of all, it is now possible to monitor resources consumption and therefore to obtain significant savings: beneficial for both economical and ecological sustainability.

Furthermore, Smart Maters allow us to control also the parameters of networks, making it possible to spot any anomaly.

ESA Automation Smart Meters and energy management

Speaking of sustainability in an industrial context, energy efficiency is clearly the hottest topic that comes to mind. This is where Smart Meters shine the most.

That is why ESA Automation has created a range of solutions inclusive of Smart Meters that allow continuative and distributed monitoring of energy consumptions and network quality.

Once installed, these devices connect to the other meters and machineries in the plant and start an automatic data transfer.

On top of monitoring consumption, they also carry out a predictive maintenance function, allowing us to record power peaks or other problems that require intervening.

That is what a Smart Meter is: a device that collect information about consumption and share it with other systems that are connected to the plant, carrying out by themselves monitoring and optimization functions.

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