Energy Saving Smart Industrial Air Filtration

Company: a leader in industrial air filtration

Hastings Air Energy Control manufactures and services advanced industrial ventilation, vehicle exhaust removal, air filtration, and energy-saving control systems that improve air quality in industrial environments. Applications for Hastings’ products include ambient fume, dust, odor, and smoke capture; dust collection (wood, cement, blending, grinding); welding smoke and fume; vehicle exhaust removal; and machine mist collection.

Opportunity: smart industrial air filtration

Industrial air filtration systems play a crucial role in maintaining air quality by capturing dust, welding fumes, wood dust, and airborne particles from food processing facilities. Traditional filtration systems operate continuously, leading to excessive energy consumption, increased maintenance costs, and limited visibility into system performance.

Hastings’ IVEC Control products address these challenges by optimizing the efficiency of air filtration systems, helping businesses save thousands of dollars annually in energy costs. The Hastings IVEC team recognized an opportunity to leverage data from their air filtration control products to gain deeper insights into system performance, enhance maintenance services, and provide customers with valuable analytics — particularly tracking energy cost savings compared to conventional filtration systems.

The challenge: scaling a proof of concept

Initially, Hastings developed an in-house solution that combined hardware gateway functionality with custom software. While this approach demonstrated the potential value of data-driven insights, it fell short in performance and features, and each installation was manual and time-consuming.

Improvements required additional custom development, every update was time-consuming to deploy, and ongoing maintenance pulled resources away from core engineering — making it clear Hastings needed a more scalable, sustainable, off-the-shelf solution.

Solution: a strategic decision

After exploring various solutions, Hastings selected Exosite’s Industrial IoT Platform and ExoSense condition monitoring solution to power their IVEC Command remote monitoring product. Exosite’s ease of use, robust functionality — including real-time and historical data visualization, user permission controls, and hierarchical management — made it the ideal choice.

Exosite collaborated with Hastings through a phased approach: a pilot proof of concept to validate the required functionality and gain stakeholder buy-in; integration and migration of existing in-field IoT gateways to the Exosite IIoT platform; a scalable rollout with templates and workflows to streamline customer onboarding; and an ongoing roadmap to expand functionality.

A key advantage of the system is its adaptability to the varied and custom configurations of industrial air filtration systems. ExoSense’s flexibility allows digital twin assets to be tailored to specific use cases, available edge data, and customer visualization needs.

Results

For Hastings: a revenue-generating subscription model centered on remote monitoring; enhanced customer engagement through proactive maintenance insights; a strengthened competitive position; and less time spent onboarding and administering the solution, freeing the team to focus on core technology advancement.

For their customers: real-time tracking of energy savings and actionable insights for optimizing system performance and reducing consumption; monitoring, tracking, and reporting tools to ensure a safe work environment through improved air quality management; and minimized downtime through predictive maintenance.