THE SEVERN CONTROL’S BMS BUREAU A VIRTUAL ENERGY MANAGER FOR EDUCATIONAL BUILDINGS
The building management systems installed in schools, colleges and universities must be actively monitored, otherwise they will be inefficient within 2-3 years and the education authorities will have missed out on valuable information that could save even more energy. Severn Controls managing director Paul Bolton discusses the benefits of the latest generation of BMS bureau.
According to the Carbon Trust there are more than 30,000 schools and further education colleges in the UK, educating young people from 3-19 years of age. Besides being the largest ‘estate’ in the public sector many school sites also have sports facilities that may have some limited community use outside normal school hours. Despite local authority efforts to reduce costs the energy bills to run UK schools is around £350M per annum and the emit over 5 million tonnes of CO2/year – around 15% of total public sector emissions.
With heating, lighting and information and communication technologies (ICT), cited as the biggest areas of energy saving potential, it is estimated that a saving of just 5% across all education establishments could save over £20 million and 300,000 tonnes of CO2.
In modern educational establishments it is likely that the first two, HVAC and lighting, will be controlled by a building management system. ICT on the other hand may be considered to be outside the control of BMS, as may all the services if facilities such as classrooms and sports halls are made available for adult education and community use. When commodity prices were stable, having a school building controlled even if it wasn’t controlled efficiently, was for many local authorities the main benefit of a BMS. However, the rising cost of energy suggests the need to focus energy-saving technologies.
A typical BMS installation properly configured, commissioned and maintained should create energy savings of at least 20%. However this really does rely on the system being ‘properly configured, commissioned and maintained’, when in many cases ‘set and forget’ is the reality. So in the absence of facilities managers to monitor BM systems in educational buildings, maintain setpoints and time clocks, note alarm conditions and faults, and take action; what are the options?
The sensible answer is to employ a ‘virtual energy manager’ in the form of the latest generation of BEMS bureau, which focuses on putting a capital E for energy into BMS. Using sophisticated software and highly trained operators a bureau will bring together all the elements of the BEMS jigsaw and more, to form a complete picture. And like all good pictures, the deeper you look into it the more you see and understand.
On a day to day basis, a bureau removes local control of a school’s HVAC, lighting and other services by providing operators to monitor, adjust and advise on every aspect of BEMS; and the mass of equipment that keeps it operating efficiently.
Now let’s imagine one of the school’s temperature sensors is damaged and provides a sub-zero reading that forces the heating system to over compensate, creating an uncomfortable environment and wasting huge amounts of energy. The only way school staff could deal with the situation is to switch off – and that may mean sending school children and students home. However, the bureau operator monitoring the school can connect to the BMS, switch off the sensor and adjust nearby sensors to balance the heating system. This achieves a comfortable compromise until an engineer (alerted to the fault by the bureau via email) can replace the sensor. And as the system is balanced the visit needn’t be an emergency call-out.
Significantly, this incident may even have covered the school’s annual cost of the bureau, which in many cases is the equivalent of a single service call by a maintenance engineer.
This may be hard to believable, yet without the information provided by the bureau, the same fault could have taken three visits to identify and rectify, and cost three times more than one year’s bureau monitoring!
This is the reality of a ‘virtual energy manager’; and faults are often rectified before the school even knows there is a problem.
Even greater benefits are derived when a bureau is integrated with BEMS sub-metering. It then becomes, in effect, an energy targeting system that profiles consumption using automated metering and targeting (AM&T) to produce a ‘league table of energy consumption’ of different items of HVAC and lighting equipment in different areas of the school such as individual classrooms, common rooms, libraries, sports halls and even swimming pools.
Where a bureau differs from an external metering service is the operator’s ability to then identify anomalies and take the necessary action to rectify them.
The bureau operator can, for example, identify class rooms or other areas with above average HVAC faults and, by interrogating the software, review specific heating or air conditioning units, report on failure rates, and show whether faults are the same or different. The results may also highlight a manufacturing issue that prompts a review of equipment in other areas of the school.
Bureau software can also log simple Health and Safety activities such as regular testing of emergency lighting circuits and fire alarm systems, to show that schools are conforming to regulatory standards. Conforming to Part L ‘Conservation of fuel and power' is also simplified by monitoring and recording gas and electricity usage. In effect, the bureau is monitoring and safeguarding the health and safety of the school building.
A bureau can monitor new or existing BMS installations. However, monitoring existing systems first requires a thorough audit of a site as, over the years, additional plant may not have been connected to the BMS, a prime example being ICT equipment!
A complete re-commissioning is also essential to ensure that all equipment that can be controlled is brought into the BEMS and monitored by the bureau to ensure that, in future, as little energy as possible is used to meet the schools educational and extra curricular/community objectives.
Summing up, whether the building is a community school or a complex university campus, energy saving is, and will continue to be, a major incentive for employing a bureau. But I hope I’ve convinced you that its true potential is significantly greater.
Ends
Home | About Us | Portfolio | Approach | Contact Us | Sitemap
16 The Cornhill, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 2JT | Tel: +44 (0) 1453 755 551 | Fax: +44 (0) 1453 751 525
Copyright © 2011 Cantillion King Advertising