Over €3,000 saved with a single sensor

In the small village of Haimpfarrich near Roth, there is a manufactory 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 it leaves the workshop. What began generations ago as a small mill with a sawmill is today a family-run business that combines tradition and craftsmanship with an honest commitment to sustainability. This very commitment was the starting point for the collaboration with strait earth, because true sustainability in medium-sized businesses rarely begins with big words and almost always with a concrete operational detail.

At a glance

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

1. The initial situation

During the manufacture of their floors, Decker generates large quantities of wood chips. Instead of disposing of them, the manufactory uses them directly as fuel for its own biomass heating system. This is a closed loop that fits the company's ethos and carries it through the cold months. The only weak point was that no one knew in real-time how full the silo actually was.

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

1. The solution

Together with Decker, strait mounted a non-contact radar sensor on the silo lid. The sensor measures the fill level continuously and maintenance-free, even with the heavy dust generation that occurs inside a wood chip silo. The measured values are transmitted wirelessly via LoRaWAN to the strait platform, where they are visualized in real-time. As soon as the fill level falls below a defined minimum, strait automatically triggers a notification so that the reordering process can 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 strait, so that consumption is no longer read from the meter once a year, but is documented continuously and in real-time. No one has to climb the silo anymore, no one has to guess how much fuel is left, and no one has to laboriously gather meter readings at the end of the year.

1. The result

The weekly silo inspection by the plant manager alone adds up to around 32 hours a year over the heating season. Based on his personnel costs, this corresponds to an expense of over 1400 euros annually, and that does not even include the time of the two colleagues who cannot produce during this period. When you add up the idle production and the expensive, short-term additional purchases, the avoided costs per year clearly exceed the 3500 euro mark.

Today, this effort is offset by ongoing costs that are only a fraction of that amount, meaning the investment amortized within a few weeks rather than years. In addition, employee safety has improved, as the dangerous climb onto the silo in wind and weather is now completely eliminated.

The side effect: a greenhouse gas balance that runs alongside

The radar sensor not only measures the fill level, but also the actual consumption of wood chips via the 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, providing the data points for Scope 2 emissions in an equally automated way and without manual reading. Thus, two inconspicuous devices at the plant create a greenhouse gas balance sheet that automatically populates a significant part of Scope 1 and Scope 2. Figures that used to be rough estimates are now traceable data points, without requiring a single additional work step.

What the story shows

A manufactory that has focused on quality and diligence for generations did not invest in a sustainability project here, but rather 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 additional 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 yield a measurable return. This is exactly what operational sustainability in medium-sized businesses should look like.