The seven things AutoMate does
DataMate measures every circuit in your welfare cabins: heaters, air conditioning, lights, sockets, the water heater, the drying room. AutoMate is the same box switching those circuits at the distribution board when they do not need to be on. Everything it does is one of seven things, and each one is set out below with worked site examples underneath it.
Measure it, fix it, scale it. Your next step is free monitoring on your own cabins. Check how your site compares first if you want a read on your setup before a conversation.
What AutoMate controls, what DataMate measures
One box, fitted beside your existing distribution board, in one visit. It arrives measuring and it can be switched to controlling later without anybody coming back to site.
DataMate is the measuring half, and it is free. Every circuit in the board is measured, including circuits we would never switch, plus door, occupancy, temperature and humidity sensors in the rooms. Nothing is controlled. You get a picture of what your cabins actually do, hour by hour, on your own meter.
AutoMate is the controlling half, and it costs £25 per cabin or bay per week. Four contactors in the same box intercept the circuits worth switching: heating, air conditioning, drying room, water heater, lights and sockets. Life-safety circuits such as the fire alarm are measured and never switched. Turning control on is a software change, not a second install.
Seven capabilities decide when a circuit is switched. Switching a circuit is the easy part; deciding when is the product. The seven are the same seven listed on the AutoMate page, and this page is where each one is shown working.
Twelve scenarios. The first comes in four parts, so there are fifteen examples in all. Every one of them is illustrative: the sizes and the times on screen are example figures chosen so the story adds up, not measurements from a customer's site, and no site shown is a real one. Our measured results, each with the client, the cabin count and the exact period attached, are on the case studies. How a saving is calculated is on the methodology page.
Capability 1 of 7
Timers
A timer on its own says a circuit runs between these hours. AutoMate uses the timer for something narrower: it sets when a circuit is allowed to run at all. Inside that window the room still decides whether it needs to. Outside it, nothing runs, no matter who forgot what.
Visual demonstration to follow
A light animated illustration will sit here. Nothing is drawn yet; it goes in only once Jamie has approved it.
Examples of this on site
Example 3 The drying room
The drying window opens at six in the evening and closes at six in the morning, and inside it nothing runs unless there is actually wet gear in the room. On a dry week the window opens every night and the room never comes on at all.
Example 12 The forgotten lights
The compound moved in June and the lights still come on at six every morning over the patch of ground the site left behind. Somebody set that timer correctly once, and changing it back was never anybody's job.
Example 11 The water boiler
A 3 kW immersion holds a welfare tank at temperature around the clock, so the water is perfect at three in the morning when the compound is locked. The window closes overnight and reopens in time for the first brew.
What this means on site. Nobody has to remember to switch anything off at the end of a shift, and a setting somebody made in June stops costing you money in September.
Capability 2 of 7
Occupancy
Sensors in each room tell the difference between a room in use and an empty one, so heat, light and power follow people instead of following the clock alone. When a room empties, the heating drops back to a holding temperature rather than switching off dead. We call that holding temperature setback, and it is the reason nobody walks into a freezing office in the morning.
Visual demonstration to follow
A light animated illustration will sit here. Nothing is drawn yet; it goes in only once Jamie has approved it.
Examples of this on site
Example 2 The empty cabin overnight
Everyone leaves at half six and, left alone, the cabin draws almost as much at two in the morning as it does at midday. AutoMate takes it down to setback, pre-heats before the first person opens the door, and never touches the fire alarm.
Example 8 The weekend
Three o'clock Friday to seven o'clock Monday is sixty-four hours with nobody on site for any of them. It is the same mechanism as any other empty period, at a scale that changes the arithmetic, and it happens fifty-two times a year without anybody scheduling it.
Example 13 The uncancelled cabin
Groundworks finished a fortnight ago and their office is still on hire, still heated and still lit, because de-hiring a cabin is a phone call somebody has to remember to make. Nothing on site stops working if they forget, so nothing tells you.
What this means on site. You stop paying to heat, light and dry empty rooms, and nobody notices anything different when they walk back in.
Capability 3 of 7
Peak shave
Your generator, or your temporary grid connection, is sized for the worst quarter of an hour the site will ever see, not for the energy you use across the day. On a welfare compound that worst moment is nearly always break time, when the kettles, toasters and microwaves all go on at once. AutoMate watches the load climbing and steps other circuits back for the few minutes it lasts, so the peak never happens and you can hire smaller.
The four examples below are the approved animations. They run on a loop with a pause button and a start again button, and every size on screen carries its unit.
Example 1a The peak shaver
Without AutoMate the offices and the drying room are on full when the canteen fires up at break, and the site needs a 60 kVA generator to carry that one moment. With AutoMate the offices run at a managed temperature, the drying room runs one heater, and both step out while the canteen runs, so a 20 kVA does the same day.
Scroll sideways to see the whole animation.
Illustrative. The kVA sizes are example sizes chosen so the story adds up; they are not measurements.
Example 1b The silent night
The engine stops at six and the battery carries the site overnight, but the heaters and the drying room were left on, so the battery is flat by two in the morning and the engine starts up next to somebody's house. With AutoMate the same battery is still over half full at seven, and the engine never starts.
Scroll sideways to see the whole animation.
Illustrative. The battery drain rates are example figures chosen so the story adds up; they are not measurements.
Example 1c The bigger generator
To charge a battery and run the site at the same time, the engine has to be bigger, not smaller, so the battery you hired to save fuel has put you on an 80 kVA. With the load halved and the spikes taken out, a 40 kVA has the headroom to do both.
Scroll sideways to see the whole animation.
Illustrative. The kVA sizes and the battery figures are example figures chosen so the story adds up; they are not measurements.
Example 1d You might not need the battery
A battery in power assist helps a 40 kVA engine through the busy moments so the peak never lands on the engine alone. That is exactly what the peak shaver does, so with the same 40 kVA engine you can do the day with no battery on the ticket at all, at about half the cost.
Scroll sideways to see the whole animation.
Illustrative. The kVA sizes and the hire costs are example figures shown as bars, not prices; they are not measurements.
What this means on site. A smaller machine on the hire ticket for the whole job, less fuel through it, and one less argument about the size of a temporary supply.
Capability 4 of 7
Conflict detection
A thermostat on a wall can only ever see its own room. It cannot see the air conditioning unit two metres away that somebody set to cool in July, and it cannot see the external door somebody has propped open with a fire extinguisher. AutoMate watches every circuit in a room together, works out that only one of them can be right, and stops the other.
Visual demonstration to follow
A light animated illustration will sit here. Nothing is drawn yet; it goes in only once Jamie has approved it.
Examples of this on site
Example 5 Heater versus air conditioning
A 3.2 kW heater and a 2.8 kW air conditioning unit have run all day in the same office, and the room temperature has not moved. Neither appliance is faulty and neither person was wrong; they simply cannot see each other.
Example 4 The propped-open door
Somebody has wedged the external door open and the heater has no idea, so it works harder. AutoMate gives it sixty seconds of grace, because people do walk through doors, then switches it off and logs which door, how often, and for how long.
What this means on site. You stop paying for plant that cancels itself out, and the conflict lands on your report, so somebody resets the panel properly instead of it coming back next season.
Capability 5 of 7
Fault surfacing
A heater whose thermostat has failed closed does not look broken. The room is warm, warm is what people notice, and nothing about the room tells you anything is wrong. The electricity does: a circuit that never stops drawing is a circuit with a fault on it, and once every circuit is measured that stops being invisible.
Visual demonstration to follow
A light animated illustration will sit here. Nothing is drawn yet; it goes in only once Jamie has approved it.
Examples of this on site
Example 6 The dead thermostat
This heater has not switched off for eleven days and nobody has reported it, because the room is warm. A healthy heater on the same site cycles on and off all day; this one is a flat line, which is what a failed thermostat looks like in data.
What this means on site. A fault becomes a line on your report with a circuit and a date attached, so it goes to your cabin supplier as a maintenance request with evidence rather than an argument about whose fault it is.
Capability 6 of 7
Reporting to the load
A load is a single thing that uses electricity: one heater, one water heater, one bank of lights. Every figure we show you can be opened downwards until you reach the load it came from. This is not a control behaviour, which is why it has no site story of its own; it is the reason the other six can be checked.
- Organisation your business
- Project the job you own the P&L for
- Site the compound
- Building one cabin
- Room the drying room
- Load the heater on circuit 4
Examples of this on site
None. This one has no scenario, because it is not something the box does to a circuit. It is how everything the box does gets reported back to you.
What this means on site. When you challenge a number, you can follow it down to the heater it came from, on the day it happened, rather than taking our word for a total.
Capability 7 of 7
Feedback and learning
AutoMate will sometimes get a room wrong. Somebody is cold, or a room needed to run when the rules said it did not. You tell it once, we change the rule, and the rule stays changed. This is the part you actually have to trust, because the alternative is somebody switching the box off at the mains.
Visual demonstration to follow
A light animated illustration will sit here. Nothing is drawn yet; it goes in only once Jamie has approved it.
Examples of this on site
Example 7 You tell it once
The other examples show the system getting it right. This one shows what happens when it does not: somebody says the office was cold on Tuesday, the rule for that room changes, and it does not need telling twice.
Example 9 The QR code on the wall
The people who notice a cold room are not the people with portal logins, so there is a code in every cabin. Scan it, say what is wrong in your own words, and it reaches the right place with that room's sensor readings already attached. No app, no login, no ticket to raise.
What this means on site. Your people can flag a problem in fifteen seconds without asking you first, which is why the box stays plugged in.
There are more than twelve
A dehumidifier running in a room with the window open. A jet washer on a socket circuit that trips the supply every third Tuesday. An air conditioning unit cooling a plant room that wanted to be warm. Every site produces its own version.
The useful question is never which features we have. It is what your site is doing at four in the morning that you would stop if you could see it, and that is the question DataMate answers, free, once your consumption settles into a baseline. Then you decide whether it is worth removing.
Film
One optional film may sit here later. It is not built and nothing is embedded on this page yet.
Placeholder, no video is loaded by this page
When it is agreed, this slot holds a poster frame with a play button, no autoplay, and the full transcript underneath it in HTML so the film can be read rather than watched. Until then the light animated illustrations above are the whole visual language of this page.
See it on your own cabins
Everything above is a worked example. The version that matters is your own compound, on your own meter, and that part is free.
DataMate goes on your next project at no cost: we monitor your cabins until consumption settles and you get the wastage review. It costs you coordination and one visit from our engineer at the distribution board. Nothing is controlled and nothing is charged until you have seen what is there.
Prefer a read on your own setup before a conversation? Check how your site compares, open, no email needed to see the result. Prices and the guarantee are on pricing; the box, the board and the install are on AutoMate.