Data insight for smarter business decisions.

Focal Insight is Focal Energy's energy monitoring platform for its clients. A check meter records the site's electricity supply every half-hour, and one web login shows consumption, demand, power factor, power quality and each month's cost worked out from the site's tariff.

Check metering is measuring your electricity supply with a meter of your own, separate from the utility's billing meter. It gives you a second record of the same supply, half-hour by half-hour, to check the bill against and to manage your use with.

The council's meter serves the council's bill: you see its readings once a month, as totals, and sometimes as estimates. A check meter gives you the half-hours behind those totals within hours, so you can manage consumption and query a bill with evidence. You can't manage what you can't measure.

Yes, by comparison: the platform works out each month's bill from your check meter's readings and your tariff, line by line, with the kWh and the billed kVA beside it, and you set it beside the invoice. The billed kVA is the platform's highest half-hour, so expect small differences from the council meter's own figure. Council reading periods seldom match calendar months; the half-hour download lets you add up the exact days an invoice covers. Talk to us before you dispute an invoice.

Power quality is how closely your supply holds its proper voltage and frequency, balanced across the three phases. Voltage that runs high or low, or phases out of balance, can trip equipment and shorten the life of motors. Focal Insight shows each phase's voltage against the band set by NRS 048-2, the South African standard for quality of supply, and counts the time outside it. It judges half-hour averages, so an excursion shorter than half an hour may not show.

By showing which half-hours set your peak. On most South African demand tariffs the charge follows the month's highest half-hour of demand in the hours the tariff counts, usually in kVA, and some tariffs also hold a floor or a 12-month maximum, so one start-up or one overlap between shifts can cost far more than its energy. Once you know when the peak happens, you can stagger loads, move a process or correct the power factor, and see the result the next day.

Power factor is the share of the power you draw that does useful work: kW divided by kVA. Where demand is billed in kVA, a low power factor raises the charge for the same work. Focal Insight shows power factor in every half-hour, so you can see whether correction is needed and whether correction already installed is doing its job.

Our platform collects new readings every two hours. Every screen shows the time of the latest data and when the next update is due, so you always know how current a figure is.

Focal Insight is for Focal clients. We set up a login for each person your company names, and each person chooses their own password from a link we email to them. One login can hold several of your company's sites.

Only the people your company asks us to give a login, and the Focal staff who run the service. Each login sees only its own sites, and the database itself enforces that, not only the screens. The companies that host the service and collect the readings for us are named in our privacy notice.

Yes, where your login includes downloads: every meter's half-hour rows over the days you choose, as a CSV file for a spreadsheet or as JSON for a program.

A check meter on the incoming supply, or a suitable meter of your own already there, and a logger that sends its readings over the mobile network. Not every meter can be read, so we confirm each new site's meter on site first.