Featured Project of the Year: Atlas Box Deploys Digital Lumens for Energy Intelligence

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EMT-Awards-TopProject15This article is sponsored by Digital Lumens

“LEDs are being deployed rapidly these days, and the use of smart sensors certainly takes the product to the next level. This project has a great return and delivers solid reductions in energy usage. The use of data from the motion sensing system to track motion throughout the plant added additional efficiency to the operation.”

--Energy Manager Today Awards judge

At the end of 2012, Atlas Box & Crating Company took steps to begin saving energy. First, the company engaged Groom Energy to perform building energy assessments. The company determined Atlas Box’s electric bill was too high, and noticed that the high costs came from lighting the building, not from the actual equipment within it. With a goal of reducing lighting costs and controlling and monitoring lighting, Atlas Box turned to Digital Lumens and its intelligent LED lighting system. The project won an Energy Manager Today Project of the Year Award and is profiled, along with other Project of the Year and Product of the Year Award winners, in a special report.

Atlas Box selected Digital Lumens’ system to deploy in multiple Massachusetts facilities system because the sensors integrated in each fixture collect occupancy data, providing insight into occupancy patterns, operational characteristics, and usage of other building systems, allowing the company to optimize energy consumption, the company says. The initial implementation resulted in a 75% decrease in yearly energy consumption, and the system paid for itself in less than a year

digital lumens atlas box image reducedAtlas Box was able to not only maximize lighting savings, it reduced overall energy consumption via Digital Lumens’ premier energy management platform: LightRules, an IoT-based software that communicates wirelessly with the light fixtures. Using LightRules, Alas Box was able to create a heat-map to track occupancy patterns. That insight incentivized Atlas Box to consolidate and adjust the layout of its products to optimize efficiency, resulting in massive employee time savings. Simply by consolidating the products in aisles, Atlas Box has saved approximately an hour per shift in time savings. Occupancy between aisles is much more consistent now. After experiencing this great success saving and managing energy in an efficient way, Atlas Box deployed Digital Lumens’ technology in multiple Massachusetts facilities.

Atlas Box implemented the multi-measure energy efficiency retrofits and reduced the total energy consumption by 1.25 million kilowatt-hours – 55 percent of their total energy consumption.

One judge called the project an “interesting use of technology for additional intelligence about process and planning.”

Environment + Energy Leader