I’ve been with this plant for over 20 years, and earlier this year we finally got approval to upgrade some of our oldest equipment — mostly motors and HVAC units. I worked closely with our vendor to identify what they called “quick wins,” and we installed several high-efficiency motors on our production lines and swapped out two aging rooftop units.
The problem is, three months in, I’m not seeing the savings we expected on our utility bills. Our kWh usage is down a bit, but demand charges are still high, and overall spend is about the same as last summer.
We don’t have a full building automation system — just a few local meters and monthly utility bills to work with. Leadership is already starting to question if the upgrades were worth it, and I don’t have the tools or data to prove otherwise.
Has anyone else been in this situation? How do you measure and verify savings after an upgrade when your facility doesn’t have advanced submetering or EMS in place?
I’m open to any low-cost tracking methods or tools that can help me show the value of what we did before budget season rolls around.
Hi Miles, thanks for sharing this, you’re definitely not alone in running into this issue after efficiency upgrades.
Without sub-meters or an energy management system, it can be hard to show the full value of what you’ve done, especially if other factors (like demand charges or seasonal shifts) are offsetting your savings on the bill.
A few suggestions that might help:
Create a simple energy baseline — Use past 12–24 months of data to calculate a baseline energy intensity (e.g., kWh per unit produced or operating hour). Then track monthly performance post-upgrade and compare. If HVAC was a big part of your upgrade, comparing energy usage normalized against heating/cooling degree days might help isolate improvements .
Use portable meters to calculate savings — If your plant allows it, consider using portable meters on a few upgraded pieces of equipment for 2–4 weeks. That could give you proof of concept for additional metering investments.
Even simple visuals or estimates like these can help build your case when presenting to leadership.
Hope that helps, let us know how it goes or if you’re exploring other measures too.
Appreciate the suggestions, this gives me a few angles to explore that I hadn’t thought about.
We don’t have any sub-meters in place yet, but I might look into borrowing a temporary one just to track one of the upgraded motors. I hadn’t considered the degree day comparison either, I’ll check if we can get that data and use it to show a normalized trend.
This at least gives me something to put in front of leadership. Thanks again.