24 n VARIABLE-SPEED DRIVES March 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com How the printer of this mag is using VSDs to cut its costs by 62% Lincolnshire-based Warners prints some of the UK’s best-known trade and technical magazines – including Drives & Controls and its sister publication, Plant & Works Engineering. In 2021, David Cobb joined the familyowned firm as engineering manager and secured a budget to upgrade its facilities. “I started my career at Warners as an apprentice and when they rang to ask me back, I jumped at the chance,”he recalls. “A big factor in my decision to rejoin was that Warners is willing to provide a budget for me to invest in the factory as long as I can prove my case. “We started with a few small projects and then moved on to a major project to upgrade the dry waste extraction system with the goal of cutting energy consumption. It was an easy decision for our managing director to approve the project.” An audit was conducted of all three of Warners’buildings, and it became clear that the waste extraction systems serving two of the buildings (Factories 1 and 3) were significantly oversized and running 24/5, thus using unnecessary amounts of energy. Waste extraction is an essential aspect of Warners’production processes and involves removing waste paper trims. However, these systems were affecting both efficiency and profit margins. The waste extraction system was installed around 20 years ago to meet the needs of a previous generation of machinery. Since then, Warners has expanded into a new factory and changed the layout of its equipment, with the new machines requiring only a fraction of the original ventilation capacity. “The existing system included a 75kW fan and a 37kW fan, each of which served three machines,”Cobb explains. “However, these machines don’t always run – for example, we only run a specialised binder around 30% of the time. “The biggest problem with the old system was that three machines were connected to each extraction fan,”he continues. “This set-up didn’t allow us to turn off the extraction fan when one or two of the machines were not being used. We had a centralised extraction system, and we wanted to change to a decentralised system. This would allow us to turn the waste extraction fan off when the machine was not being used, and by integrating PLC control with the machines, we could automate this process.” Evaluating the options Warners appointed Schneider Electric to audit the legacy assets and produce four reports that proposed efficiency-focussed upgrades based on budget, current systems and best practice. “There were two options, with the first and most basic plan saving around 15% energy,” explains Schneider drives application engineer, Dave Whitehouse. “However, we could see a second option that would save much more energy – in the order of 50% – which could be achieved by upgrading the system. It would require smaller ductwork, and smaller drives and motors.” With waste extraction being an area that needs expert knowledge, Warners called in the specialist waste and dust handling company, Paramount Waste Extraction, to develop a more detailed scheme based on the second option. Its engineer recommended creating four groups of machines, each with its own extraction fan and motor. Additional energy savings were possible by automating the fans so that they run only when the related machines are running. Warners estimated that this approach would halve its energy use for these installations, cutting their annual electricity consumption from 560MWh to less than 210MWh. Based on this, it estimated a payback period of less than two years. “Seeing an ROI of less than two years and energy savings of 62% made it an easy decision for our managing director to approve the project,” Cobb recalls, “with the additional benefit of cutting our scope 2 carbon footprint.” When it came to project delivery, Warners worked with Paramount to design and build the electrical control panel. This contains Schneider Electric variable-speed drives and a PLC that automates the fans, depending on The Lincolnshire printer that produces Drives & Controls has slashed the annual energy bill for its dry waste extraction system by 62%. It has achieved this through a combination of measures including replacing some fans and introducing VSDs.
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