Over €3,000 saved with a single sensor

In the small village of Haimpfarrich near Roth, there is a workshop where a wooden floor is still understood as the largest piece of furniture in the room. Decker Holzmanufaktur manufactures exclusive hardwood floors, as well as wall and ceiling coverings, and every single plank passes through ten to fourteen pairs of hands before leaving the house. What began generations ago as a small mill with a sawmill is today a family business that combines tradition and craftsmanship with an honest commitment to sustainability. This very commitment was the starting point for the cooperation with strait earth, because in small and medium-sized enterprises, genuine sustainability rarely begins with big words and almost always with a concrete operational detail.

At a glance

Customer: Holzwerkstätte Decker
Industry: Wood Processing, SME
Solution: IoT level measurement in the wood chip silo plus smart meter for electricity consumption
Result: 3500 euros in savings per year, amortization in just a few weeks

1. The Initial Situation

During the production of their floors, Decker generates large amounts of wood shavings. Instead of disposing of them, the workshop uses them directly as fuel for its own biomass heating system. This is a closed loop that fits the business's philosophy and carries it through the cold months. The only weak point was that nobody knew in real time how full the silo actually was.

To check the level, the plant manager had to climb up the silo himself once a week and inspect it with his own eyes. This happened over eight months of the year, in all kinds of weather, regardless of how cold, wet, or slippery it was outside. During this inspection, the system stood still, and two other employees could not work at their machines during this time. The real risk became apparent whenever the silo emptied faster than expected. Then the heating system stopped, in the worst case threatening an unplanned production halt, and Decker had to purchase wood chips from outside at short notice and on worse terms.

2. The Solution

Together with Decker, strait mounted a radar sensor contactlessly on the silo lid. The sensor measures the fill level continuously and maintenance-free, even in the heavy dust generated in a wood chip silo. The measured values are transmitted wirelessly via LoRaWAN to the .five platform and visualized there in real time. As soon as the fill level falls below a defined minimum, .five automatically triggers a notification, allowing reordering to be initiated long before the heating becomes an issue.

At the same time, strait installed smart electricity meters that continuously and automatically record the company's electricity consumption. These values also flow directly into .five, so that consumption is no longer read once a year from the meter stand, but is documented continuously and in real time. Nobody has to climb the silo anymore, nobody has to guess how much fuel is left, and nobody has to painstakingly gather meter readings at the end of the year.

3. The Result

The plant manager's weekly silo inspection alone adds up to around 32 hours a year over the heating season. In terms of his personnel costs, this corresponds to an effort of over 1400 euros annually, and this does not even include the time of the two colleagues who cannot produce during this time. If you add the stagnant production and the expensive, short-term purchases, the avoided costs per year clearly exceed the 3500 euro mark.

Today, this effort is offset by running costs that represent only a fraction of it, so the investment paid for itself within a few weeks rather than years. In addition, there is the safety of the employees, as the dangerous climb onto the silo in wind and weather is now completely eliminated.

The Side Effect: A Greenhouse Gas Balance That Runs Automatically

The radar sensor not only measures the fill level, but also the actual consumption of wood chips via the fill level delta. From this consumption volume, strait automatically derives the biogenic Scope 1 emissions from biomass combustion. The installed smart meters complement this picture with electricity, as they provide the data points for Scope 2 emissions just as automatically and without manual reading. Thus, two inconspicuous devices on the business premises generate a greenhouse gas balance that self-populates a significant part of Scope 1 and Scope 2. Numbers that used to be rough estimates are now traceable data points, without requiring a single additional work step.

What the Story Shows

A workshop that has focused on quality and care for generations did not invest in a sustainability project here, but in a solution that eliminates a concrete operational problem. The fact that the greenhouse gas balance becomes more precise at the same time is not an extra effort, but a byproduct of clean data. At Decker, this technology complements the values that the company stands for anyway, because tradition and innovation do not contradict each other as soon as both pay off measurably. This is exactly what operational sustainability in SMEs should look like.