Weekly consumption alerts at a fruit farm

Background: This family business operates fruit farms and plant nurseries in Kent and Hampshire, breeding and propagating plants for other strawberry and raspberry farms across the UK and Europe.

During the growing season, the company employs temporary breeders and fruit pickers. They get accommodation in caravans around the farm. For regulatory reasons the farm cannot build permanent accommodation.

The need: The staff caravans have aluminium walls, which means that even in summer they need to have the electric heating on at night. Sometimes workers forget to switch the heating off in the morning, causing unnecessary costs. So electricity is one of the main costs for the company, but tracking its consumption has been a challenge.

Our approach: The operations director ordered our system for a site with 6 staff caravans, and then another site with over 70 caravans. The on site electricians tried out different types of hardware and found one particular relay the easiest to install.

Challenges & our approach. Mobile signal is generally unreliable on these sites, but the farm has its own Wi-Fi network that we could connect to. The ZigBee wireless range is usually 100m in open field, but the metal walls of the caravans proved to be a major blocker. So using Google Maps, the electricians strategically placed our wireless ZigBee hubs to be in reach of each caravan.

The result. The farm can now track the consumption of each caravan. The manager could also switch them off via our relay, but prefers to gently remind people to use electricity wisely.