Yes, the Vehicle Inspector consumes energy while operating. Let’s talk about how much energy the system consumes in the different operation states.
The Vehicle Inspector has five different operation states, all with a different energy kWh consumption.
Heating
Cooling
Recording
Full load (Recording and Heating/cooling)
Calculation example
Which means that the energy consumption of the VI in your environment depends on a few factors.
First of all, how much traffic does it have to handle each day?
Let’s say the system has a workload of 200 cars per day. With an average recording time of 5 seconds, it means the running 17 minutes per day in recording mode.
Next to that, in what kind of environment does it have to operate in?
As with most equipment that needs to heat and cool its system, it always uses a bigger amount of energy. When the system is cooling for 4 hours a day and heating the system for 2 hours a day, the idle time will be 17 hours and 43 minutes.
Which concludes in:
Heating time: 2 hours;
Cooling time: 4 hours;
Recording time: 17 minutes.
To calculate the total power consumption for this calculation, we need to know the kWh values.
Calculation chart
We made a calculation chart which you can use to calculate the amount of energy the VI would use in your environment.
| Operation state | Power consumption in kWh |
|---|---|
| Idle | 0.123 |
| Cooling | 0.878 |
| Heating | 0.852 |
| Recording | 0.388 |
Each country has a different price per kWh. To properly calculate the price, you must know the industrial electricity price of your country. You can view this chart or use a search engine to find the current price.
Display power consumption
Currently the VI Checkpoint doesn’t display details on the Status view about power consumption.
We would like to hear your opinion: would details about power consumption be helpful information to display on the Status view?