Case Study
How smarter controls, better UX, and disciplined engineering turned runaway power bills into measurable ROI.
This story didn’t start with a whiteboard.
It started with $8,000 electric bills.
At car wash sites, the numbers stayed high month after month, regardless of how busy the vacuums actually were.
“Why are our biggest motors running at full speed when most vacuum bays are empty?”
Section 01
The largest motors on the property were running 100% of the time, from open to close.
That would only make sense if every vacuum bay was always in use and airflow demand was constant.
Energy wasn’t being used. It was being wasted.
Before DESIGN 4 IT stepped in, Jon and an internal engineer had already proven an important concept: a vacuum is “in use” only when the nozzle is removed from its holster.
Making that reliable in the real world took years of iteration because of wind, vibration, weather, and imperfect customer behavior.
By the time Jon approached us, they had a working mechanical concept — but not a system.
Section 02
Our role wasn’t to reinvent the idea. It was to turn it into a deployable product.
Added an intelligent control layer
Designed a usable on-device GUI
Wrote the control logic that linked airflow, gates, and motor speed
Created a real BOM that could be built, installed, and supported
Made the system understandable to operators, not just engineers
We took a prototype and made it deployable.
The system needed visibility, so we added a screen-based interface that lets operators:
No cryptic LEDs. No blind tuning. This was a purpose-built control experience for industrial environments.
Systems Thinking
The real breakthrough came when airflow control and motor control were treated as one system.
Instead of relying on rubber seals across dozens of idle poles, only active poles opened. Less airflow meant less turbine load and less energy required to spin.
Section 03
The first installation ran on a 20 HP Sonny’s turbine. With just the vacuum idle system, the site achieved a 27% energy reduction in the first months.
Good — but not game-changing.
What if every vacuum pole had its own blast gate?
Once implemented, energy reduction jumped from 27% to 75%.
75%
Average power reduction
55%
Average power reduction
Stable
Verified with anemometer testing
Section 04
With an installed cost of approximately $20,000:
These are conservative numbers and include imperfect nozzle placement, occasional full-speed maintenance runs, and normal tuning realities.
Most importantly, it stopped sites from paying for energy they weren’t using.
Section 05
This project reinforced a core DESIGN 4 IT belief:
From GUI and UX to control programming to BOM and deployable hardware, this wasn’t optimization. It was intelligence added to infrastructure.
Ready to turn raw equipment into a thinking system?
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Let’s turn the idea you already have into a product you can deploy, support, and scale.
