Investing in the latest technology to save energy

At Mettis, we’re committed to making our operations as sustainable as possible and, recently, we invested almost £800,000 to reduce our energy consumption significantly with the support of a specialist energy management company.

Using technology to save energy

During a two-year, energy-reduction programme, we looked at our use of gas, electric and water then worked together to make our production processes make more efficient use of them. Among the many things we have done, we have:

• Invested in infra-red die heaters which are far more energy efficient than the furnaces which are traditionally used.
• Switched the heating of vats, used for chemical etching, from electric to gas to give us tighter control over energy consumption.
• Fitted a dedicated, energy-saving system to load air compressors for maximum efficiency.
• Upgraded our boilers to benefit from the latest, energy-efficient technology.
• Optimised voltage and fitted motion sensors to extraction fans and lighting so they switch off or reduce usage automatically when areas are unoccupied.
• Redesigned our electrical network and removed transformers to reduce waste.

The results are already starting to show

Ian Maund, who led the energy-saving programme, said: “We’re already seeing results with a significant dip in energy consumption. A big part of the success has been the effort we’ve put into changing the culture around energy use and the commitment we’ve had from people across our business.”

We communicated to our people what we needed to do, answered questions and listened to suggestions so that, in addition to the impact of all the investments, we’re also benefitting from the small changes that can be made by everyone such as keeping doors closed and shutting down computers at the end of each day.

It doesn’t end there though. We’re working to enhance our energy efficiency further over time. We have installed over 300 electric, gas and water meters to help us better monitor high-usage areas and introduced energy usage dashboards to drive cultural change further.

We plan to invest more to save energy in the future and some of the things we’re looking at are heat exchangers, recycling rain water and sourcing power from solar or wind as we continue to strive for our operations to be as sustainable as we can make them.