A traveling jib crane has three motors that run at a few percent of their nameplate rating. Here is where the power really goes from 0.25 to 2 tonnes, why regenerative braking does not pay at this size, and which two decisions actually move the bill.
A traveling jib crane from 0.25 to 2 tonnes carries 1.1 to 4.35 kW of installed motor power and burns roughly 55 to 830 kWh a year of running energy, which is USD 7 to USD 100 at a tariff of USD 0.12 a kWh. On a machine this size the hoist is the only motor doing real work. The other three exist to accelerate deadweight, not to overcome resistance.
That single fact changes what a traveling jib crane power study should conclude. Most guides written for overhead cranes get scaled down and handed to jib buyers, and the conclusions do not survive the trip. On a 50 tonne double girder crane, regenerative braking and active front end drives are worth real money and the payback is measured in years. On a two tonne jib the same hardware has a payback measured in decades, and the honest answer is to spend the money somewhere else.
So this article does two things. It works out where the electricity actually goes on a traveling jib crane, with numbers from 0.25 to 2 tonnes and from A3 to A6 duty. Then it says plainly which of the usual energy measures pay on a machine this size and which do not, and what the real lifetime bill looks like once you stop staring at the meter.
A quick note on what a traveling jib crane is, because the term gets used loosely. It is a jib crane whose mast stands on a carriage that runs along a floor rail or a ceiling track. The boom and hoist travel with the mast. That is different from a fixed pillar jib, which never moves its base, and different from a wall traveling jib, which hangs from a track on a wall. The extra motion, and the extra power feed that has to follow the mast along the rail, is what makes this type interesting from an energy point of view.
Published studies and vendor data are named as they appear. Our own planning figures, meaning the ones we calculated for this article rather than measured on a customer site, are labelled as SIEC planning figures throughout. Our traveling jib crane range runs from 0.125 to 2 tonnes with jib radii from 2 to 6 metres, so that is the band the analysis covers.
Four motions, or three if the slewing is manual. Lifting, trolley travel along the boom, carriage travel along the rail, and rotation of the boom. Then a fifth line that is not a motion at all: the control panel, the transformer and the brake rectifier, which draw power whether or not anyone is lifting anything.
The published evidence on the split comes from larger machines, and it is worth knowing which way it points. The modelling and measurement work in Energies 2024, volume 17, issue 5, article 985 puts the hoist at about 62 percent of total energy on a ship to shore container crane, with gantry travel at 31 percent and the trolley at 7 percent. Vendor material from OUCO, published 25 September 2025, describes jib cranes as consuming power across exactly the three operations you would expect, hoisting, traversing and slewing, and notes that the split depends on load weight, lift height, motor efficiency and operating frequency.
A jib crane sits at the hoist heavy end of that spread, and more so with every motion you remove. A traveling jib has a rail that is typically 10 to 40 metres long, a carriage speed of 10 to 20 metres a minute, and a boom of 2 to 6 metres, so the trolley and carriage strokes are short and the boom is light. Our planning split for a traveling jib on assembly, machine tending or maintenance duty looks like this:
| Motion | Share of consumption | Why it is what it is |
|---|---|---|
| Hoist, lifting and lowering | 70 - 82% | The only motion that does work against gravity |
| Carriage travel along the rail | 8 - 16% | Moves the mast and boom, but only against rolling resistance |
| Trolley travel along the boom | 4 - 8% | Short strokes on a 2 to 6 metre boom |
| Slewing, if powered | 3 - 8% | Zero if the boom is pushed by hand |
| Control, transformer and standby | 10 - 55% | Depends entirely on how long the isolator stays up |
Those are SIEC planning figures, not measurements from a specific installation. The last row is the one that matters on this size of machine. On a 50 tonne crane, standby is noise. On a jib crane with 2 kW of installed power, standby can be the largest single line in the year.
Small. That is the honest first answer, and it is why the energy question behaves differently here. The nameplate values below are taken from published vendor data for jib crane and chain hoist packages, and the totals are what you get when you assemble a typical traveling jib from those components.
| Capacity | Hoist motor | Trolley motor | Carriage travel motor | Slewing motor | Total installed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.25 t | 0.5 kW | 0.2 kW | 0.4 kW | manual | 1.1 kW |
| 0.5 t | 1.1 kW | 0.2 kW | 0.4 kW | manual | 1.7 kW |
| 1 t | 1.5 kW single fall, 1.1 kW two fall | 0.4 kW | 0.4 kW | 0.4 kW | 2.7 kW |
| 2 t | 3.0 kW single fall, 1.5 kW two fall | 0.4 kW | 0.4 kW | 0.55 kW | 4.35 kW |
The hoist figures come from published chain hoist tables where a 0.5 tonne unit is rated 1.1 kW, a 1 tonne unit is 1.5 kW in single fall and 1.1 kW in two fall, and a 2 tonne unit is 3.0 kW in single fall and 1.5 kW in two fall. A published 1 tonne pillar jib drawing from Yuantai quotes a 0.6 and 1.8 kW dual speed hoist motor with a 0.4 kW travel motor, at ISO A4 duty, with a rotating speed of 0.5 revolutions a minute and a travel speed of 11 metres a minute. A published 2 tonne electric swing jib from SR Hoist quotes a 1.5 kW hoist, 0.4 kW trolley and 0.4 kW travel.
Two things stand out. First, the whole machine fits inside 5 kW. Second, the two fall hoist option halves the hoist motor rating and doubles the rope or chain falls, which is the first place to look if you want to talk about efficiency rather than spend money.
This is the single most useful idea in the article, so it gets its own section.
A hoist motor lifts a load against gravity. Its nameplate rating is close to what it draws when it is working, because gravity is always there and the load is what it is. A trolley or carriage travel motor is different. It moves a mass that is already supported by wheels on a rail, and the only continuous resistance is rolling friction. For a carriage carrying 800 kg of mast, boom and hoist on steel wheels, rolling resistance at a coefficient of about 0.01 comes to roughly 78 newtons. At a travel speed of 11 metres a minute, that is about 0.183 metres a second, so the continuous power needed is around 14 watts.
Fourteen watts. The motor on that carriage is rated 400 watts. It is not oversized by mistake. It is sized for starting torque, for the acceleration of the dead mass, for a slight rail gradient, for wind on an outdoor installation, and for the fact that a motor running at two percent of its nameplate is a motor that will last a very long time. But when you see 0.4 kW on a drawing and multiply it by hours of operation, you will overestimate the travel energy by a factor of twenty or more.
| Motion | Nameplate | Typical running power | What the nameplate is really for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hoist | 0.5 - 3.0 kW | 60 - 85% of nameplate when loaded | Lifting the load against gravity |
| Trolley along the boom | 0.2 - 0.4 kW | 5 - 15% of nameplate | Acceleration, not continuous work |
| Carriage along the rail | 0.4 kW | 3 - 10% of nameplate | Dead mass, gradients, wind |
| Slewing, if powered | 0.4 - 0.55 kW | 10 - 30% of nameplate | Bearing friction and acceleration |
The practical consequence is that on a traveling jib crane, the hoist is essentially the whole bill, and the other three motors are decoration as far as energy is concerned. Any calculation that treats them as if they ran at nameplate is wrong, and wrong in the direction that makes people buy equipment they do not need.
Work it out per lifting cycle rather than per hour, because a jib crane is a cyclic machine and the cycle is easy to describe. Define a standard cycle for the calculation: 50 percent of rated load, 4 metres of lift, 3 metres of trolley travel, 8 metres of carriage travel, and a 90 degree slew. Then build it up from physics.
The lifting part is the only term that needs real arithmetic. Energy to raise a load is mass times gravity times height, divided by the drive efficiency. For a 1 tonne crane at 50 percent load, that is 500 kilograms times 9.81 times 4 metres, divided by 0.85 for a three phase drive, which is 23,082 joules, or 0.0064 kWh. Lowering the same load costs the drive nothing if the energy is dumped in a braking resistor, because the load does the work on the way down. It costs a little if the drive has to hold a controlled descent, and it actually returns energy if there is a line feedback unit, which we come back to.
The travel and slew terms come out in the fourth and fifth decimal place, which is the point of the section above. Adding them in for completeness gives this:
| Capacity at 50% load | Lift energy per cycle | Travel and slew per cycle | Total per cycle, no recovery |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.25 t (125 kg) | 0.0016 kWh | 0.0010 kWh | 0.0042 kWh |
| 0.5 t (250 kg) | 0.0032 kWh | 0.0012 kWh | 0.0076 kWh |
| 1 t (500 kg) | 0.0064 kWh | 0.0015 kWh | 0.0143 kWh |
| 2 t (1,000 kg) | 0.0128 kWh | 0.0020 kWh | 0.0276 kWh |
From there, the four step method is the same one we use on every crane enquiry, and it takes about two minutes by hand.
Step one, take the total installed motor power from the table earlier. Step two, divide by the drive efficiency: 0.85 for a three phase drive, 0.80 for three phase contactor control, 0.70 for a single phase hoist. Step three, multiply by the load factor for the duty class, which is 0.25 at A3, 0.32 at A4, 0.40 at A5 and 0.48 at A6. Step four, multiply by the equivalent running hours and your tariff. If you would rather work in cycles, multiply the per cycle figure above by the cycle count instead, which is what the next section does.
More than tonnage does. A vendor duty class table for pillar jib cranes describes A3 as light duty at up to 1 hour a day and about 15 cycles, A4 as medium at 1 to 2 hours and 30 cycles, A5 as standard at 2 to 4 hours and 60 cycles, A6 as heavy at 4 to 8 hours and 120 cycles, and A7 as severe at 8 or more hours and 240 cycles, with engine duty rising from 25 percent at A3 to 60 percent at A7. Those definitions translate into cycle counts of 3,750 a year at A3 and 30,000 a year at A6 on a 250 day working year.
Multiply the per cycle energy by that range and you get the table that decides the whole article:
| Capacity | A3, 3,750 cycles | A4, 7,500 cycles | A5, 15,000 cycles | A6, 30,000 cycles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.25 t | 16 kWh | 32 kWh | 63 kWh | 126 kWh |
| 0.5 t | 29 kWh | 57 kWh | 114 kWh | 228 kWh |
| 1 t | 54 kWh | 107 kWh | 215 kWh | 429 kWh |
| 2 t | 104 kWh | 207 kWh | 414 kWh | 828 kWh |
At USD 0.12 a kWh that is USD 2 to USD 99 a year of running energy across the whole grid, and the eight fold spread between the top left and bottom right corners has nothing to do with the crane. It is duty class. A two tonne jib on light duty uses less than a one tonne jib on heavy duty. Tonnage is not the variable that matters.
Over ten years, with a 3 percent a year tariff escalation which multiplies the annual figure by about 11.46, a 2 tonne traveling jib at A6 works through roughly 9,500 kWh, or USD 1,140 of electricity. Our indicative FOB pricing for a traveling jib in that capacity band starts in the low five figures. So the ten year power bill is somewhere between five and twenty five percent of the machine price. It is real money. It is not the biggest number in the room.
More than you would think, and this is the one energy line where a traveling jib crane is genuinely worse than a big overhead crane in relative terms.
A small control panel with a transformer, a contactor coil and a brake rectifier draws 15 to 60 watts continuously while the isolator is closed. The exact figure depends on the panel, the control voltage and whether the brake releases on DC or AC, but the band is reliable. Multiply it by the hours the crane is powered:
| Standby draw | Powered 2,000 h a year, single shift and switched off | Powered 4,000 h a year, two shifts | Powered 8,760 h a year, never isolated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 W | 30 kWh, USD 3.60 | 60 kWh, USD 7.20 | 131 kWh, USD 15.72 |
| 30 W | 60 kWh, USD 7.20 | 120 kWh, USD 14.40 | 263 kWh, USD 31.56 |
| 60 W | 120 kWh, USD 14.40 | 240 kWh, USD 28.80 | 526 kWh, USD 63.12 |
Now compare that with the running energy. A 1 tonne traveling jib at A5 uses 215 kWh a year of actual lifting, trolley, travel and slew. If it is powered around the clock, the standby line alone is 263 kWh. The crane spends more energy waiting than working. That is the whole finding, and it costs nothing to fix.
If you run a plant with twenty jib cranes, all left powered at night and at weekends, the standby bill is around 5,200 kWh a year, or USD 630, and about USD 7,200 over ten years. That is a maintenance programme's worth of money, produced by a habit rather than by a machine.
No. Not on this size of machine, and it is worth showing why rather than just asserting it, because the marketing for regenerative drives does not scale down.
The physics is straightforward. When a loaded hoist lowers, the motor becomes a generator and pushes energy back toward the drive. A braking resistor turns that energy into heat. A line feedback unit, sometimes called an active front end, converts it back to alternating current and returns it to the supply. The recoverable energy per lowering is the same mass times gravity times height, multiplied by a recovery efficiency that vendors put at 60 to 80 percent.
For a 1 tonne jib lowering 500 kilograms through 4 metres, the potential energy is 19,620 joules, or 0.0054 kWh. At 70 percent recovery that is 0.0038 kWh returned to the supply per lowering. Multiply it out:
| Capacity at 50% load | Recovered per lowering at 70% | Per year at A5, 15,000 cycles | Per year at A6, 30,000 cycles | Value at A6, USD 0.12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.25 t | 0.0011 kWh | 16.8 kWh | 33.6 kWh | USD 4 |
| 0.5 t | 0.0022 kWh | 33.6 kWh | 67.2 kWh | USD 8 |
| 1 t | 0.0045 kWh | 67.2 kWh | 134.4 kWh | USD 16 |
| 2 t | 0.0090 kWh | 134.4 kWh | 268.8 kWh | USD 32 |
A small line regenerative drive carries a premium of roughly USD 350 to USD 800 over a braking resistor solution, depending on the drive rating and the brand. Against USD 16 to USD 32 a year of recovered energy on a two tonne machine at heavy duty, that is a payback of fourteen to fifty years on a crane with a fifteen to twenty year design life. On a one tonne machine at A5 it is closer to a century.
The comparison is not unfair to the technology. On a 50 tonne crane at 30,000 cycles a year the same arithmetic produces tens of thousands of kilowatt hours, which is why port and metallurgical cranes use active front ends routinely. The technology is sound. It simply does not have enough load and lift height to work with on a jib crane. If a supplier quotes you a regenerative drive for a 1 tonne jib and justifies it on energy savings, ask for the cycle count and the lift height, then do the calculation above.
Not on electricity, and this is where a lot of published guidance misleads jib crane buyers.
Vendor guidance for general purpose workshop cranes puts VFD energy savings at 20 to 30 percent against contactor control, rising to 30 to 45 percent on high duty cranes with frequent regeneration and active front ends, with a quoted payback of 12 to 24 months. Those figures come from cranes with tens of kilowatts of installed power and thousands of operating hours a year. On a 2.7 kW jib crane, 20 percent of the hoist share of a 215 kWh year is about 32 kWh, which is under USD 4.
| Motion | Energy saved on a 2.7 kW jib at A5 | SIEC planning figure for the drive premium | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hoist | About 32 kWh, USD 3.90 | USD 300 - 900 | Controlled lowering, soft stop, longer brake life |
| Carriage travel | About 4 kWh, USD 0.50 | USD 150 - 400 | Soft start, mast stability, no jolt on a light rail |
| Trolley | About 3 kWh, USD 0.40 | USD 150 - 350 | Positioning accuracy, load sway control |
| Slewing | About 2 kWh, USD 0.25 | USD 200 - 500 | Smooth rotation, soft stop instead of a bang |
So the answer is not that VFDs are pointless on a jib crane. It is that they are a control investment, not an energy investment, and the two should not be mixed up in a capital approval. What a VFD genuinely delivers on a traveling jib is a soft start that stops the mast from snatching on a light rail, a controlled lowering that removes the brake from the duty cycle, a usable creep speed for machine tending, and sway control that shortens the cycle. Shortening the cycle does save energy, indirectly, but the saving is a by-product rather than the case for the spend.
If the drive is bought for control and the energy comes along for free, that is a good purchase. If it is bought on a payback spreadsheet filled in with large crane numbers, the spreadsheet is wrong.
Three phase, in almost every case, but not for the reason the energy discussion would suggest.
Single phase capacitor run hoist motors are typically 65 to 72 percent efficient against 82 to 87 percent for a comparable three phase motor. Applied to a 1.1 kW hoist motor, that is roughly 1.57 kW of input against 1.29 kW, a 21 percent difference in hoist input power whenever the motor is lifting. In absolute terms on a traveling jib it is worth about USD 1 to USD 5 a year, so nobody should convert a supply for the saving.
The real reasons to insist on three phase are capacity and duty. Single phase chain hoists generally stop at around one tonne. They have a lower duty rating, so an A5 or A6 jib cannot be built on a single phase hoist at all. They have higher starting current, which matters if the jib shares a small distribution board. And a single phase drive has no DC bus, so there is no route to controlled descent, let alone any future regenerative option. Three phase also opens the door to a two speed or VFD hoist, which is where the real cycle time gains are.
If the building only has a single phase supply available and the crane is a light duty 250 or 500 kilogram unit, single phase is a perfectly reasonable answer. Just size it as what it is: a light duty machine that will not be upgraded.
This is the energy question that is really a lifetime cost question, and it only exists on a traveling jib. A fixed pillar jib gets a fixed supply drop. A traveling jib has to carry power to a mast that moves along the rail, which means either a festoon cable system or a conductor rail.
Published comparison data for crane electrification puts festoon cable at EUR 25 to EUR 60 per metre installed and conductor rail at EUR 60 to EUR 200 per metre, with festoon cable life of 5 to 8 years at A4 to A5 duty and 3 to 5 years at A6 to A8, against a conductor rail life of 15 to 20 years and brush life of 10,000 to 20,000 kilometres. Maintenance intervals are six months for festoon and twelve months for conductor rail. A separate published cost breakdown for overhead crane power supply quotes USD 80 to USD 200 per runway metre for an open conductor bar and USD 150 to USD 400 for an enclosed one, with annual maintenance of USD 300 to USD 1,500 per runway for a standard festoon system.
| Item, 25 m rail at A5 duty | Festoon cable | Conductor rail |
|---|---|---|
| Installed cost, at published EUR rates | EUR 625 - 1,500 | EUR 1,500 - 5,000 |
| Component life | Cable 5 - 8 years at A5 | Rail 15 - 20 years, brushes far longer |
| Replacements in 15 years | 1 - 2 cable sets | None |
| Indicative 15 year total | EUR 1,000 - 3,500 | EUR 1,500 - 5,500 |
| Maintenance visits | Every 6 months, cable tension and trolley wheels | Every 12 months, brush wear and rail cleaning |
| Energy consequence | Cable drag adds to travel resistance if poorly set up | Small contact resistance, negligible at 2 kW |
The crossover for cost sits somewhere around 80 metres of travel, which is why a jib rail of 10 to 40 metres almost always ends up with festoon. The conductor rail only wins if the environment is wet, dusty or corrosive enough that cable life collapses, if the travel speed is high, or if the plant standard insists on one system across every crane.
On the energy side there is one genuine point buried here. A festoon that is over tensioned, or whose trolley wheels have seized, adds drag to every travel stroke, and that drag can exceed the carriage's own rolling resistance. Since travel is only 8 to 16 percent of a jib crane's consumption, doubling it moves the annual figure by a few dozen kilowatt hours, which is a few dollars. Fix it for reliability, not for the meter.
Fewer motors than you would expect, and the exemptions are the interesting part.
Regulation (EU) 2019/1781 has applied since 1 July 2021 and requires three phase motors from 0.75 kW to 1,000 kW, with 2, 4, 6 or 8 poles, to reach at least IE3, and motors from 0.12 kW to 0.75 kW to reach at least IE2. A second tier from 1 July 2023 requires IE4 for three phase motors from 75 kW to 200 kW, and that tier explicitly excludes brake motors, increased safety motors and other explosion protected motors.
Then the exemption list in Article 2, and this is where crane hoist motors mostly live. Motors with an integrated brake forming part of the inner motor construction, which cannot be removed or powered by a separate source during efficiency testing, are exempt from the efficiency requirements. So are motors completely integrated into a product where the energy performance cannot be tested independently, and motors with an integrated variable speed drive.
A jib crane hoist is almost always a brake motor in the first of those categories. The practical effect is that a large share of the small crane hoist population sits outside the headline rules, even though a 1 tonne hoist motor at 1.5 kW is nominally above the 0.75 kW line. That is not a loophole anyone should be pleased about. It is a reason to specify efficiency rather than assume the regulation has done it for you.
For reference, and this is the number worth remembering, the efficiency tables in the regulation give a 1.1 kW four pole motor as 84.1 percent at IE3 and 87.2 percent at IE4. That 3.1 point gap applied to a jib hoist running a few hundred hours a year is worth about 9 kWh a year, or roughly USD 1.10. Upgrading a jib hoist motor from IE3 to IE4 for the energy saving is not a business case. Upgrading from an older IE1 or IE2 motor, which is what is actually installed on a lot of existing jibs, is a different story, because the gap there is much wider and the motor is usually at the end of its life anyway.
Jib cranes mostly live in the IEC world, but the difference matters if you are exporting or relocating equipment.
IEC motors are rated for zone A voltage variation of plus or minus 5 percent and frequency variation of plus 2 and minus 3 percent, with a wider zone B of plus or minus 10 percent and plus 3 and minus 5 percent. IEC does not recognise a service factor, and instead classifies duty as S1 through S10. A crane hoist is normally S3, intermittent periodic duty, or S4, intermittent periodic duty with starting. The Delacco duty table for jib cranes expresses the same idea in everyday terms, with A5 duty at about 60 cycles a day and 40 percent engine duty, and A6 at 120 cycles a day and 50 percent engine duty.
NEMA motors are rated at plus or minus 10 percent voltage and plus or minus 5 percent frequency, and they do carry a service factor, typically 1.15, which allows 15 percent overload continuously at rated voltage. That service factor is often misread as a hidden capacity bonus. It is not a licence to run a hoist at 115 percent of its rating all day, because the brake and the gearbox are not covered by it.
For a jib crane the practical consequences are small and concrete. A 400 V 50 Hz jib and a 480 V 60 Hz jib are different machines, not the same machine with a different plug, because hoist speed scales with frequency: a 6.8 metre a minute hoist becomes 8.2 metres a minute at 60 Hz, which changes the energy per cycle not at all but changes the cycle time by 20 percent. And a NEMA and an IEC motor of nominally the same rating have slightly different efficiency on the nameplate, with the same design usually reading about 0.3 of a percentage point higher on the IEC plate.
The tariff multiplies everything above, and the spread between markets is larger than any engineering decision in this article.
| Market | Industrial rate | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| European Union average | EUR 0.199 per kWh | BusinessEurope data hub, 2024 figures published 10 June 2025 |
| China | EUR 0.082 per kWh, and CNY 0.571 industrial in January 2026 | BusinessEurope 2024, Intratec price assessment updated 3 September 2026 |
| United States average | EUR 0.075 per kWh, and 9.17 US cents industrial in June 2026 | BusinessEurope 2024, US EIA Electric Power Monthly 2026 |
| United States, California | 20.74 US cents per kWh | US EIA Electric Power Monthly, June 2026 |
| China, business tariffs | 11.6 US cents per kWh in April 2026 | Statista, published 7 August 2026 |
Run the smallest and largest of those against a 2 tonne traveling jib at A6 and the ten year difference is roughly USD 850 against USD 2,250 for the same machine doing the same work. That is not a reason to site a factory in one country rather than another. It is a reason to know which tariff you are quoting against before you decide whether the energy line is worth optimising at all.
By payback, and with the honest ones at the top:
| Priority | Action | Capital | Annual effect | Payback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Isolate the crane when the bay is idle | None | Up to 263 kWh, USD 32 | Immediate |
| 2 | Set the duty class from the real cycle count at enquiry | None | Up to an eight fold swing in running energy | Immediate |
| 3 | Take manual slewing if the layout allows it | Minus USD 400 to 900 on the quote | Removes a motor, a brake and a control circuit | Saves capital |
| 4 | Choose two fall reeving if the hoist is oversized | None | Halves the hoist motor rating on 1 t and 2 t units | Immediate |
| 5 | Service the festoon and tension it correctly | USD 50 - 300 | A few kWh, plus reliability | Justified on reliability, not energy |
| 6 | Fit a VFD to the hoist and carriage travel | USD 450 - 1,300 | USD 4 - 5 in energy | Buy for control, not for energy |
| 7 | Fit a line regenerative drive | Plus USD 350 - 800 over a brake resistor | USD 4 - 32 recovered | 14 to 50 years. Do not. |
The first four lines cost nothing or save money, and they cover most of what any jib crane owner can actually do. Lines six and seven are the ones that get sold on an energy story, and on this size of machine the energy story does not hold up.
With a meter, on the feeder, before and after. Not with a calculation.
The trouble with a jib crane is that the numbers are small enough to disappear into the noise of a workshop. A 3 kW feeder shared with a welding set and a compressor will not show you a 30 watt standby load. If you want to measure it properly, put a small kWh meter on the dedicated circuit for the crane, log it over a full month of normal production, then change one thing and log again for the same length of time. Keep the production output in the log, because if the month after the change happened to be a busy one, the crane will have used more energy and you will conclude the wrong thing.
Our honest advice for most jib crane owners is simpler than that. Meter it once if you are curious, then go and look at the maintenance log instead. On a machine this size, the cable set, the brake, the festoon trolleys and the wheel bearings cost more over fifteen years than the electricity does, and they are the things that decide whether the crane is available when the production line needs it.
Cycle energy uses mass times gravity times height divided by a three phase drive efficiency of 0.85, with a standard cycle of 50 percent rated load, 4 metres of lift, 3 metres of trolley travel, 8 metres of carriage travel and a 90 degree slew. Duty cycle counts come from published jib crane duty class definitions at 15, 30, 60 and 120 cycles a day across A3 to A6 on a 250 day year. Motor ratings are taken from published vendor data for chain hoists and jib crane packages at 0.25 to 2 tonnes.
Energy share by motion is a SIEC planning split for a traveling jib on assembly, machine tending or maintenance duty, cross checked against the modelling in Energies 2024, volume 17, issue 5, article 985 and the vendor description published by OUCO on 25 September 2025. Standby draw of 15 to 60 watts is a SIEC planning range for a small control panel with transformer, contactor coil and brake rectifier. VFD savings of 20 to 30 percent and 30 to 45 percent and the 12 to 24 month payback figure come from published crane VFD guidance dated 24 June 2026. Electrification costs come from published festoon and conductor rail comparisons dated 30 June 2026 and 3 June 2026. Motor efficiency thresholds and the brake motor exemption come from Regulation (EU) 2019/1781. Tariffs come from BusinessEurope, the US Energy Information Administration, Statista and Intratec as dated in the table above.
Everything described as a SIEC planning figure is our own calculation for this article, not a measurement taken on a customer site. Where a number comes from a published source it is named next to the number.
From 0.25 to 2 tonnes our planning model gives roughly 16 to 828 kWh a year of running energy across A3 to A6 duty, which is USD 2 to USD 99 at a tariff of USD 0.12 a kWh. Add 30 to 526 kWh a year for standby if the crane is left powered when it is not in use. A one tonne jib on standard A5 duty sits near 215 kWh of running energy and USD 26 a year, before standby.
The hoist, and by a wider margin than on any other crane type. In our planning split the hoist takes 70 to 82 percent, carriage travel 8 to 16 percent, trolley travel 4 to 8 percent and powered slewing 3 to 8 percent. The reason is that the hoist is the only motion working against gravity. The carriage and trolley motors move a supported mass against rolling resistance only, which is why they run at a few percent of their nameplate rating.
No. A 1 tonne traveling jib at 15,000 cycles a year recovers about 67 kWh, worth around USD 8, and the drive premium over a braking resistor is roughly USD 350 to USD 800. That is a payback of forty years or more on a crane with a fifteen to twenty year design life. Our traveling jib cranes from 0.125 to 2 tonnes are quoted with braking resistors as standard for exactly this reason, and with a line feedback unit only when the duty genuinely justifies it.
Only slightly. On a 2.7 kW jib at A5 duty, a 20 percent saving on the hoist share is about 32 kWh, or under USD 4 a year, against a drive premium of USD 300 to USD 900. Buy the VFD for controlled lowering, soft starting on the travel motion, creep speed for machine tending and load sway control. The energy saving is a by-product, and on a jib crane it is never the case for the spend.
It is worth considering, but for mast stability rather than for energy. A traveling jib carries a mast and boom on a carriage, and a snatch start on a light rail rocks the whole structure and swings the load. A small drive on the carriage travel, typically USD 150 to USD 400 on a 0.4 kW motor, gives a soft start and stop. The energy it saves is under a kWh a year, so approve it as a control improvement if you approve it at all.
Two things, and neither costs anything. Switch the crane isolator off when the bay is idle, because a jib left powered around the clock can spend more on standby than on lifting. Then set the duty class from the real cycle count at the enquiry stage, because the difference between A4 and A6 in our model is a factor of four. Together those two beat every retrofit on the list, and they cost nothing but the discipline to do them.
If you want the energy line modelled against your own tariff, cycle count and lift height, send us the lift data and we will run the calculation before you commit to a hoist, a drive or a retrofit programme. On a traveling jib crane there are only two decisions that move the electricity number at all, the duty class and how long the isolator stays up. Get those right and the rest of the power bill takes care of itself. The money you were going to spend on a regenerative drive is better spent on the cable set and the brake.
Our traveling jib crane range from 0.125 to 2 tonnes is quoted with chain or wire rope hoists, manual or powered slewing, and contactor or VFD control, and we will size the electrical package to your supply voltage, duty class and cycle count. If you want the cost side of the same picture, the traveling jib crane cost and total cost of ownership guide covers equipment price, installation and the ten year total, and the installation guide covers the rail, the anchoring and the load test.
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