Your gen is a power station with no meter on it. In Nigeria, that's the biggest bill in the building.
The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria puts industry's 2025 spend on self-generated power at about ₦1.34 trillion — up 71% in two years — with energy running around 40% of factory operating costs. Band A promised grid relief at ₦200+/kWh; reality still hands much of the load to the gen. Yet most sites can't answer three questions: where does the diesel actually go, what does a self-generated kWh truly cost, and will the set start when "Up NEPA" goes quiet? addanode instruments exactly those questions.
Three generator problems every Nigerian operation knows.
Diesel that evaporates on paper
Fuel is Nigeria's most-stolen industrial consumable — siphoned from tanks, skimmed at delivery, burned by idling sets nobody scheduled. Continuous tank telemetry knows the difference: consumption is a smooth curve matched to load; theft is a sharp drop, usually at night; a short delivery is a refill that doesn't match the waybill. Each pattern raises its own alert, with timestamps.
Self-gen cost nobody has actually computed
Litres burned, kWh produced, maintenance hours — combined, they give the true naira cost of a self-generated kWh, per set. Set against your Band A (or B, or C) tariff and time-of-day load, the numbers decide what belongs on grid, what belongs on gen, and where solar-plus-battery quietly wins the small hours. Most sites have never seen this number; it changes decisions the week it appears.
Fleets running blind across sites
A head office with twenty branches owns twenty gensets, twenty diesel tanks and twenty logbooks of variable honesty. Fleet telemetry puts every set on one dashboard — run-hours, fuel, health, outstanding services — so maintenance is scheduled by data, refuelling routes by level, and the branch that burns double gets asked why.
Fitted to Nigerian power reality.
- The gen is primary, not backup. With grid supply averaging a handful of hours daily in many areas, Nigerian sets run duty cycles their manufacturers never imagined. Monitoring tracks run-hours toward service honestly, watches coolant and oil-pressure trends on long runs, and flags the set that's being run into the ground before it fails mid-shift.
- Band A raised the stakes on both sides. At ₦200+/kWh, grid power is no longer obviously cheaper than well-run self-generation — and expensive enough that billing errors matter. Per-phase incomer metering verifies what the DisCo delivered against what was invoiced, while gen-side metering completes the comparison.
- Multi-source sites are the norm. Grid + gen + inverter + increasingly solar: the changeover fabric itself needs watching. We log every transfer event and its duration, so "the ATS hesitated and dropped the servers" becomes a diagnosable record, not a mystery.
- Hardware survives the environment. Heat, dust, vibration and voltage chaos are the operating spec, not the exception. Sensors and gateways are industrial-grade, surge-protected, solar/battery-backed, and buffer locally — the record survives exactly the events it exists to capture.
Spending and tariff figures are MAN and published-press numbers. This build is our load-shedding-hardened power telemetry from Southern Africa, tuned for gen-primary Nigerian duty.
One gateway per site, four questions answered.
1 · Grid
Per-phase presence and quality at the incomer; every outage and restoration logged — your own record of what the DisCo delivered.
2 · Gensets
Run status/hours, start events, battery voltage, temperatures, load per set — controller Modbus or retrofit sensing, any brand.
3 · Fuel
Bulk and day-tank levels, consumption curves, refill verification against waybills, sharp-drop theft alerts.
4 · Cost
kWh by source, naira per kWh on gen vs grid, cost per shift or unit — the numbers the solar and scheduling decisions need.
Single sites live in 1–3 weeks on the addaNet platform. For what power events do to production specifically — downtime, restart scrap, line-level impact — see power & downtime monitoring; this page is the generator-and-fuel side of the same picture, and the two share one dashboard.
Nigeria's generator economics on one table
| Fact (2025) | Figure | What the gateway logs |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturers' self-generation spend | ₦1.34 trillion — up 71% on 2023 | Genset run-hours and fuel per site |
| Energy share of operating cost | ~40% | kWh per unit of output, grid vs genset |
| Band A grid tariff | ₦200+/kWh (from ₦68) | Grid kWh at tariff vs genset kWh at fuel cost |
| Grid availability | ~6 hours a day | Mains presence, outage duration, restart time |
Where generator visibility pays in Nigeria.
Manufacturers — Lagos, Ogun, Aba and Kano plants where energy is 40% of operating cost and the MAN numbers are lived experience, often beside OEE monitoring · Multi-site operators — banks, telecoms, retail chains and fuel stations with genset fleets across states · Estates and facilities — residential and commercial estates where diesel is the service-charge flashpoint and verifiable billing is the theme · Cold chains and pharma — depots where a failed changeover is a written-off inventory · Water schemes — borehole and treatment operations whose water records depend on power continuity.
Generator monitoring in Nigeria — common questions
How does generator fuel monitoring detect theft?
By signature. Legitimate burn is a smooth level decline matched to run-hours and load. Theft is a sharp drop — typically at night or during shift change, often with the set off. A short delivery is a refill step smaller than the waybill. Continuous telemetry separates all three and alerts with timestamps, which is what turns suspicion into a resolvable incident.
What does a self-generated kWh really cost in Nigeria?
It depends on diesel price, set efficiency and load factor — which is exactly why it must be measured per site rather than quoted from a rule of thumb. Metered litres and kWh give you the true figure; most sites find lightly loaded sets producing power at multiples of even Band A rates, which reshapes run scheduling immediately.
Can you monitor any generator brand or size?
Yes — from 20 kVA branch sets to MW-class plant. Controllers with Modbus are read directly; basic sets get retrofit sensing (clamps, run-state, battery voltage, level senders). Vendor-neutral by design, so service agreements and warranties stay intact.
How is this different from your power & downtime monitoring page?
Two halves of one picture. Power & downtime monitoring looks at what electricity events do to production — stoppages, restart losses, line impact. This page is the supply side: the gensets, the diesel and the cost of every self-generated kWh. Most Nigerian plants ultimately want both, on the one dashboard they already share.
Does monitoring work across a fleet of branches?
That's the strongest use case. Every site reports into one fleet view — fuel levels for refuelling routes, run-hours for service scheduling, outage logs per branch, and league tables that surface the outlier burning double. Sites phase in a few at a time; no simultaneous nationwide rollout required.
What does it cost, and what's the payback?
Per site: a gateway plus the sensors your sets and tanks need, quoted as a written band after a free remote review of your fleet list. Payback usually arrives through fuel — a caught theft pattern, an idling set rescheduled, a delivery shortfall documented — before the maintenance and uptime benefits are even counted.
Put a meter on the power station you already own.
Send us your genset and tank list — sizes, sites, how they're fuelled. We'll propose fleet monitoring that pays for itself out of the diesel line.