MachineQ unveils IoT-based power monitoring
- September 10, 2024
- Steve Rogerson

Pennsylvania-based MachineQ has launched IoT-based power monitoring to help enterprises manage their energy consumption, leading to operational efficiencies, proactive maintenance, managed costs and sustainability efforts.
Enterprises will be able to understand asset use with actionable data.
The power monitoring is particularly relevant for high-energy consumers, such as food service companies, laboratories and hotels, which consume more energy than typical commercial buildings due to their energy-intensive equipment and asset-intensive operations.
“We’ve seen increased demand from current and prospective customers seeking ways to understand power consumption and obtain executable data to help them reduce energy utilisation,” said Bryan Witkowski, head of product at MachineQ. “This offers customers flexible options to help not only monitor but also help manage their energy usage. Plus, with many companies focused on sustainability initiatives, this can help play a vital role towards measuring and achieving those efforts.”
One industry where sustainability efforts are top of mind is life sciences, where pharmaceutical companies have asset-heavy, power-intensive lab operations. Power monitoring can provide lab managers with insights by tracking the energy consumption of equipment, such as centrifuges, and correlating those data to frequent or infrequent use. Linking consumption and usage data can help identify opportunities to reduce energy (turn it off when not in use), aid sustainability efforts, and help determine whether to reallocate the asset to another location, decommission it or buy something better.
Additionally, it can help aid in predictive maintenance for critical equipment, such as an ultra-low temperature freezer. By detecting anomalies in power consumption, which often indicate equipment issues, lab managers can proactively service or replace units before they fail. For instance, if a freezer starts using more energy to maintain its set point temperature, this could signal the need for maintenance or indicate the unit is nearing the end of its life.
MachineQ offers various ways to monitor power consumption accurately using IoT sensors that can extract data at the receptacle, equipment, or breaker level. The MQpower CT (www.machineq.com/products/mqpower-ct) is a wireless, self-powered current transformer that can be clamped to electrical conductors at the breaker or asset level to measure real-time current consumption in a simple, non-invasive way.
The MQpower SP (www.machineq.com/products/mqpower-sp) is a smart plug load device that enables businesses to plug in equipment and assets to extrapolate energy data, including daily energy use, instantaneous current, voltage, active power and power factor. It supports various plug types, including US (type B), UK (type G), EU (type F) and FR (type E). The MQpower SP and MQpower CT both support regional LoRaWan frequencies globally.
Power monitoring complements smart metering capabilities by providing a holistic view of energy consumption and actionable insights to monitor, control and manage consumption more intelligently. Plus, like all MachineQ products, these use cases run on the same scalable network infrastructure, helping users lower the cost of ownership of their IoT investment over time.
MachineQ (www.MachineQ.com), a Comcast company, helps enterprises build, connect and deploy IoT at scale.