CLIEncoders · Industries
Engineering for energy and utilities
Energy hardware lives in cabinets nobody visits, measures something that must be defensible, and has to keep reporting when the network does not.
Measurement you can defend
In most sectors a sensor reading is information. In energy it is frequently the basis of a bill, a settlement or a compliance report — which means accuracy, calibration and traceability stop being nice properties and become the requirement.
That changes the design. Calibration coefficients stored per unit rather than assumed, drift accounted for over the life of the device, timestamps that survive a clock reset, and enough recorded context that a disputed reading can be investigated rather than argued about.
Connectivity you cannot rely on
Meters sit in basements, substations sit in fields, and neither has good signal. A design that assumes an available connection produces gaps in exactly the data that matters.
We build for the opposite assumption: local storage sized for realistic outage durations, device-side timestamps so backfilled data lands correctly in the series, and a platform that distinguishes a device that has gone quiet from one reporting genuine zeros. LoRaWAN, cellular and wired options get chosen against your actual deployment rather than a default.
What the platform side looks like
Time-series storage that stays fast as history accumulates — PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB where the query patterns justify it — with aggregation, tariff-aware calculation and reporting on top.
Then anomaly detection over consumption and load data, which is where the operational value tends to concentrate: spotting the failing asset, the unexpected draw, or the meter that stopped reporting three days ago before anyone notices at month end.
Questions
What people ask before starting
Can you work with our existing meters and equipment?
Usually, if they speak something documented — Modbus over RS-485 is common and well-trodden, as are pulse outputs and various proprietary serial protocols. Reading existing equipment is often much cheaper than replacing it, and building a gateway that translates your installed base into one clean data stream is a frequent and sensible first project.
Do you handle metering certification and standards?
We design toward the relevant standards and support you through approval, but certification is granted by an accredited body, not by us. The important thing is to identify which regime applies to your product and market before the design is fixed, because a metrology requirement discovered late can invalidate an entire architecture.
How do you handle devices in places with no network?
Store locally and forward when a link appears, with timestamps set at the device so the history reconstructs correctly. For genuinely disconnected sites, manual collection over BLE during a maintenance visit is sometimes the honest answer — and a design that admits that upfront works better than one that pretends coverage exists.
Can you forecast consumption or predict failures?
Yes, once there is enough history to learn from — seasonal load forecasting needs more than one season, and it is worth being clear about that before it is promised. Anomaly detection is available much sooner, since it models normal behaviour rather than requiring examples of failures.
Related
Where this usually connects
Tell us what you are building
One technical call is usually enough to tell you whether this is straightforward, genuinely hard, or the wrong approach entirely. We would rather say so early than quote for the wrong thing.
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