CHESTER Lets Surun Services Add IoT Energy Metering to Its Portfolio

Surun Services is a company operating on the west coast of Australia. Its core business is technical asset management and projects in electrical-infrastructure management. It serves mainly local government, with clients including the cities of Perth and Joondalup and operators of venues such as Perth Sport Arena and Stadium Nib.

The Challenge

Surun’s aim was to expand its service offering by providing electricity-consumption information to its clients. For the measurement they chose the industrial SATEC EM133 power meter, which offers multi-function three-phase power measurement and power-quality information, with an LCD display, two digital inputs, one digital output, an IR interface, and an RTC battery. It can be used anywhere from residential metering to industrial switchboards and substations, and mounts on a DIN rail.

The Solution

We supplied Surun Services with a CHESTER IoT Hub in an enclosure carrying the Surun logo, communicating over LoRaWAN. We extended the device with an X2B module (RS-485 interface) and prepared firmware for Modbus communication to connect to the selected meter. This lets us send voltage, current, frequency, and consumption information to the internet over the LoRa network.

Through The Things Industries network, the data is transferred into Azure - IoT Central and a Cosmos DB database - which Surun Services has used long term. From there the data is available for analytics, visualization, and alerting.

Why We Chose LoRaWAN

Given our existing experience and the well-developed LoRaWAN infrastructure around the cities of Perth and Canning, we favored the LoRa network over NB-IoT for this project. Surun also has a CHESTER version with NB-IoT technology for other projects.

Results

Thanks to HARDWARIO, Surun Services now has a new smart electricity-metering service in its portfolio, which it offers to companies and to city administrations. The service lets clients track current consumption and provides data for analytical decision-making and optimization.

This project also began a long-term partnership between HARDWARIO and Surun Services across Australia. Alongside the CHESTER IoT Hub with LoRaWAN, the collaboration will also use the NB-IoT version, with which we have had good experience in Australia and New Zealand.