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DMC is working with Panasonic to provide power consumption feedback for industrial machinery. If a piece of equipment is going to consume thousands of dollars of electricity each year, isn't it worth keeping tabs on it?

Panasonic's line of low-cost industrial power meters provide instantaneous and totalized power consumption information to your existing SCADA system through a multi-drop RS485 interface. Or you can add Panasonic's own data collection and reporting server for out-of-the-box web based power consumption reporting.

A sample system that we just quoted is for a machine with a 230V, 50A, 3 phase power supply. Components required are:

• Panasonic KW7M: $353
• 2 50-Amp current transformers: $40 each.

That's it! $433 bucks hardware cost! And it will communicate to the existing SCADA system by Modbus RTU over RS485.With the knowledge of your machine's energy consumption in different modes, and different speeds, it is possible to optimize the trade-off between production rate and energy consumption. With the low cost of this equipment it makes sense to include power monitoring in almost any new automated system.