Energy Audit Uncovers 25% Energy Waste

ecoDriver^® Low Carbon Consultants audited a building’s energy consumption and identified energy waste because of faulty occupancy schedules enabling out-of-hours operation.

Understand

The energy consumed by a building outside of normal operation hours should be as low as practical and only consist of those systems and services that are absolutely necessary e.g. emergency lighting, IT Servers, fridges, frost and fabric protection.

A building’s overall energy profile and baseline can be determined from main billing meter energy profiles but to understand what is consuming the energy and when a more granular understanding is required.

In this customer example we:

• Captured main electricity and gas meter data
• Installed sub-meters to monitor HVAC plant and captured data in the ecoDriver^® energy management platform
• Conducted a detailed energy profile audit

Once data had been captured for a couple of weeks the ecoDriver LCC team audited the energy profiles.

The building’s standard operating times are Monday to Friday, 8AM to 5PM and unoccupied at weekends. However reviewing the weekly energy profiles it was apparent that the building’s energy consumption did not match the occupancy profile. The chart below is from one of the HVAC plants electricity meters and shows weekend and weekday consumption levels were similar.

Further investigation found that building control schedules had in fact been configured to align with occupancy and the HVAC should have been turning ON/OFF accordingly. The reality was that the HVAC plant remained on out-of-hours.

Act

Following a review of the BMS strategy it was determined that there was conflict between schedules and other inputs which meant the schedules were not enacted.

Revising the HVAC strategy and schedules to remove conflict has resulted in a reduction in weekend consumption by 70-80% and weekday consumption by 30-40%. The overall effect on total electricity is a reduction of approx. 25%