Building Optimization Made Easy: Start with the Basics
Fact: It is estimated that 30% of all energy used in commercial buildings is wasted*
Challenge: But where is the best place to start?
In the ever-expanding world of building data and analytics, a common question that arises is not if Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) has value, but rather how to best maximize the value of FDD with the least amount of upfront cost and effort? To harvest and intelligently utilize all the data a building has to offer, businesses must evolve the way they work, along with the process of ingesting, modeling, and interpreting that data. This barrier to entry has turned otherwise forward-thinking businesses and individuals into the proverbial groundhogs, peeking their heads out of their borrows, and deciding if another 6-week nap is the best plan before taking any action.
So how then can we inspire actions with the somewhat daunting level of effort required for these digital transformations? Better yet, are there better options to reduce this level of effort? The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and so we must decide where to take that first step and focus our efforts.
Pareto’s Principle
To evaluate the proper strategy for this phased approach, we need to consider Pareto’s Principle, where 20% or less of the effort will grant me 80% or more of the value. This is not only a question of strategy but one of focus and scale. If we are looking to better serve a site with 400 pieces of equipment, where do we begin? A logical place to start is automating the central plant diagnostics.
Why Begin with the Central Plant?
It likely comes as no surprise to anyone in the Building Services industry, that central plants make a logical starting point for such endeavors. The central plant carries a host of advantages when considering integration to an FDD or Building Analytics tool. A non-exhaustive list of advantages include:
Asset Value – Central plant equipment is often some of the largest and most expensive in a building. Thus, there is a higher need to secure their value by ensuring proper maintenance, potentially leading to extended lifespans.
Performance Impact – Central plant equipment is often essential to maintaining site comfort and overall system performance. Failures in these plants can often lead to major consequences for the entire building.
Energy Savings – Central plant equipment is generally very large, has far-reaching usage, and tends to be some of the biggest energy hogs in the building. Improvements to the equipment’s sequence and operations can have major overall system and energy impacts.
Centralized Controls – Central plant automation systems are often bundled onto a single control device due to their very close physical proximity. It is common to see entire chiller or boiler plants on a single unitary controller. This tends to make building automation implementation easier, as there are fewer steps to ingesting and employing the data.
Low Equipment Count – Central plant equipment is generally very large and has such broad use, the total equipment counts tend to be lower, leading to lower implementation and recurring costs over time. This also means the value per equipment and per point are significantly higher than other equipment with less broad application throughout the building. In some cases, an entire heating and cooling plant system can be integrated with fewer than two dozen total pieces of equipment.
Proving a Return on Investment
Once implemented, these central plants become a low-cost way to prove the value of FDD and Building Analytics without a huge time or cost commitment. The ROI opportunities and potential are immense since the equipment is highly valued. Once the value can be clearly demonstrated, it becomes easier to spread from there and integrate other equipment throughout the building. Furthermore, the savings incurred from the initial implementation may be used to fund the expansion, creating a snowball effect of savings compounding upon themselves.
But what kinds of opportunities should we be seeking now that we’ve identified the physical focus of our initial offerings? Again, simplicity is key in starting the endeavor.
What Data to Focus on First?
There is a notion in energy savings called “The Observer Effect”, where businesses can save on average 5% of their energy use simply by measuring, observing and making smarter choices. This effect goes beyond simple energy savings and is related to the old adage: “What’s measured gets managed”. To make any progress in energy spend or operational efficiency, a baseline measurement must be established and recorded. Second, a set of measurable data points that drive operational and energy changes must be identified within the buildings. Examples of key data types and their value are highlighted below.
Energy – Always a key starting point, energy usage at the building level provides general performance indicators but is even more valuable when provided at the asset level for each piece of equipment. If efficiency data can be shown, the user is provided even more insights into not just how much energy is used, but how well it is being utilized.
Comfort – In most scenarios, the end goal of the building systems is to ensure comfort for the people who occupy them. For our purposes, we will include within comfort any data points that ensure the proper operation of servers or other industrial equipment. Recommended data points can include temperature, humidity, and pressure.
System Control – While the end goal of the systems may be to ensure comfort, there are certain data points that are necessary to ensure operational performance. These are the high-level conditions that must exist for the direct comfort affecting equipment to operate properly and are likely the plant level equipment and systems already highlighted. Recommended data points for hydronic systems include supply water temperature, system differential pressure, equipment statuses and commands, and loop flow statuses.
Not Included Initially:
Configuration Points – These data points are related to the actual sequential setup of automated equipment and can include pid loop gains, k factors, and damper sizes, among others. While these data points are a valuable part of a deeper analytics strategy, it is recommended they are reserved until a more robust strategy is identified and ready for execution.
Which Outcomes to Focus On Next?
Now armed with a central focus on larger, more centralized assets and diagnostic data points for comfort, energy, and building operations, where should we focus next? The answer is simple: focus on the outcomes that generate the highest value to businesses, clients, and/or tenants. These targeted outcomes are more easily categorized, and we can find numerous opportunities to develop easily achievable and immediately valuable goals.
Energy – The best starting point for finding efficiencies and generating immediate value is Energy. It is estimated that 30% of all energy used in commercial buildings is wasted* and studies have shown awareness, tracking, and observation of energy can yield an average of 5% savings. Many changes are easy to identify and bring immediate, measurable value including:
Confirm power status - Many times equipment and systems are turned on when they should actually be turned off. Over time, various manual overrides, improper schedules, or poorly designed sequences cause excess and wasteful energy use. These issues are often easy to identify and fix with the proper tools.
Implement reset schedules – A slightly less obvious example is properly implementing reset schedules to optimize energy use. In this case, the equipment can be programmed to run less frequently to achieve the same results. To meet energy needs, adjust the speeds, temperatures, and other controlled values based on actual demand.
Seek Optimal Utilization – Optimize building performance and efficiency while minimizing impact to comfort by performing the majority of energy-intensive actions during off-peak hours, and reducing energy spend during peak hours by utilizing energy storage methods like generators. Look for simple ways to recapture energy use and implement optimal stops like turning off certain conditioning processes shortly before the end of the occupancy.
Operational – Operational improvements are those which directly lead to cost savings in a building. These savings are less about how the specific diagnosis is made, and instead, highlight the impacts to business risk and the bottom line. Consider the following ways an analytics tool can impact your business operations:
Assurance – Provide the customer with reliable information and knowledge that their systems and equipment are working the way they expect. Quality analytics tools leverage 24/7 data being collected to ensure everything is working correctly. If any problems arise they can be addressed immediately, rather than waiting for a complaint or the next scheduled inspection. This is especially valuable in critical environments like healthcare, labs, or data centers where outages can be extremely costly or even life-threatening.
Diagnosis – Systems that automatically identify problems and their diagnoses enable quicker problem identification, many times the identification happens well before a client and/or tenant feels the effects of the issue. Root cause diagnostics enable the technician to identify the problem and develop a resolution plan before being dispatched to the location. This reduces both initial times to service and total time to resolution, leading to decreased costs, higher rates of the first-time fix with reduced callbacks, and an increase in client satisfaction.
Confirmation – To ensure the client understands the value of the services performed, they need to be shown how the proactive service workflow identified the problem as well as how a successful resolution was implemented. Quality analytics products provide the data to demonstrate identification, resolution, and confirmation of the issue while traditional service workflows are reactionary without demonstrated resolution success.
Comfort – While the financial benefits of comfort improvements may be harder to quantify, they are not less valuable. Keeping a building, the tenants, and their operations running comfortably, smoothly and without interruption is arguably the most important objective. In some cases, higher energy costs will need to be expended to satisfy tenant needs, so quickly identifying issues that affect comfort are mission-critical, and must be resolved immediately. Strong analytics tools make this easier and more efficient than ever.
Conclusion
We can see from the outline presented here, that effective implementation of an analytics tool within a facility service business is not only potentially highly valuable but requires many considerations. And these ideas are really just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of what can be done utilizing these data analytics platforms. Often, the next step forward is to invest the operational savings into capital projects that will achieve even greater savings and improvements. The idea is to demonstrate how the focus on core areas for improvement within the building, including key data points to support those improvements result in critical outcomes that quickly add the most value.
If you’d like to discuss this topic in greater depth or would like to find out more about how Key2Act and BOB, the Building Optimization Broker, can help you to Master the Smart Building Ecosystem, please contact us.
*via EnergyStar.Gov