You know how you have an electric meter on your property to record how much energy your home or business uses every month? When you switch to solar energy, you’ll have an electric meter that works both ways: It will show the utility company how much energy you consume when your solar panels aren’t generating electricity (like at night) It will show how much energy your solar panels generated during the day See, your solar panels will produce a lot of energy during the day when the sun’s the strongest. You most likely won’t use all this solar-generated power. Your excess solar energy will feed back to the grid and help supply power for the utility company. Your utility company will pay for your solar-generated electricity by giving you credits to lower your monthly electricity bill. So at the end of the month, you’ll only pay for the net amount of electricity.

Why is maintenance — proven to be a key factor in extending equipment life, reducing downtime and lowering overall costs — so often overlooked in many operations until it becomes an emergency? There are several possible reasons: Lack of available resources — time or personnel, Inconvenient timing, Disorganization or lack of planning, Misunderstanding of the benefits and importance of maintenance, In many cases, several of these factors will exist at once. They create a maintenance deficit that, if not addressed, can add up to a significant sum of avoidable costs in operations, emergency repairs, part defects and facility safety.

Automation is the use of control systems to control processes, reducing the need for human intervention. Putting this into context, automation is having technology do things for you so that you don’t have to.