A high-tech temperature monitoring device which could help UK firms cut millions of pounds off their energy bills, has given its inventor his second major product award this year.

Andrew Jones, founder and Managing Director of Alquist, part of the ideaSpace Enterprise Accelerator programme, was presented with the Infrastructure Innovation of the Year award at the prestigious UK IT Industry Awards 2011 for his product Celsius. The awards were handed out by comedian and television presenter Alexander Armstrong at a ceremony in London, in front of an audience of more than 1,000 technology professionals from across the UK.

Celsius is a high-definition energy monitoring technology. It is of particular interest to datacentres housing banks of computer servers. Data centres currently consume 3% of total energy used in the UK. The device uses fibre-optic cable as a high-resolution temperature sensor to monitor temperatures. It is helping data centres to reduce their annual energy consumption by about 25 per cent.

“I am delighted that Alquist have been given this award. Our product impressed the judges with its brilliant use of physics in the real world, and its broad applicability – not just to data centres.” said Andrew.

Alquist’s product also won the DataCentreDynamics Future Thinking and Design Concepts award earlier this year and was a Finalist in the Data Centres in Europe 2011 awards.

The ideaspace Enterprise Accelerator programme is managed by IfM Education and Consultancy Services.