Confessions from the Trenches

As a Consultant Engineer I have been asked to do all manner of things – and the people who are paying for my work are not always the ones employing me to do the work. This can cause issues at times, when I need to work the competing requirements. My client might be asking for me to recommend one solution, whereas I might feel another solution would suit them better. There are no easy answers when a problem like this comes along unfortunately.

The reason I bring this up now is that often in this situation my employer will have brought me in to scope and design a solution that will make them money. Sounds obvious really. In some industries bringing in a consultant for advice will be free, but given the effort needed to research and write reports, the customer normally gets charged for my time. What they are really paying for rather than impartial advice is for me to design a solution based on my employers technology, and justify it.

At Redshift Wireless, one of our aims is to help our customers be more environmentally friendly. For many people this just means using less consumables, such as electricity or gas. For us, it also means re-using existing plant in more intelligent ways. It means providing centralized control to existing equipment rather than replacing the equipment.

Reuse, not replace.

Sometimes, it will be better to replace equipment, but this is not always the case. I recently looked at the energy that my fridge was using, and was rather shocked at how much it was costing me. This was mainly because it was an old fridge. So I did the calculations on how much a new fridge would save me in electricity costs, and worked out that the payback period for the new fridge was going to be close to 10 years. I felt that this payback was too small to be sustainable.  In the end I got an excellent deal on a second hand fridge from a friend who was upgrading, getting a three year payback period.

If there had been a device I could have bought and attached it to the old fridge to run it better, just imagine the savings. The old fridge would not have needed to have been disposed of, and the new fridge not made. And a lot of energy not used to operate the fridge. I would call that a win all around!