Have you ever driven past a store with a dark parking lot and assumed that it was closed and moved on? That’s a nightmare for gas stations and convenience stores, and one of our customers smartly relies on SiteSage to make sure their signs, pole lights, and canopy lights are always on when they want them to be. SiteSage energy monitoring can provide visibility into whether your lights are on and off when they should be. Of course it’s important to know if the lights are on so that guests feel invited in, but it’s equally important to make sure they are off when not needed, so that you don’t waste money lighting up your lot on a sunny day at noon.
Mechanical time clocks are the bane of many facilities managers; they lose their time whenever they lose power, are prone to physically breaking, and need to be adjusted for daylight savings, and correcting each of these issues requires a site visit. Photocells are another common solution, but those too have been known to break and we’ve seen some broken loose by storms or covered in plastic bags and bird debris.
The technologically advanced solution is our SiteSage Controller, which turns lights (and other equipment) on and off based on a remotely programmed schedule. The screenshot here shows our Controller interface. The start and end times can be relative to sunrise and sunset (as shown here), relative to open/close, or absolute time. Additionally, you can have multiple time blocks per day, and the system can integrate with a photocell to override the schedule should it be a dark, stormy day when you want your lights on during the daytime hours. It’s a big improvement from your “standard” mechanical time clock, that is for sure!
Would you like to learn more about effective asset, operations, and energy management at convenience stores?
