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Implementing a continuous
commissioning program will reduce your total energy consumption and
its related costs. A 15 – 45% reduction according to the
Energy Systems Laboratory
at Texas A&M University, perhaps the leading authorities and
practitioners of continuous commissioning.
So, Just What is Continuous Commissioning?
It's an ongoing process (not an annual checkup) for monitoring systems, diagnosing and
resolving issues, and making energy consumption as efficient as
possible while maintaining or improving building comfort. It
includes anything from physical maintenance, to control strategies,
to prioritizing and implementing retrofits.
While other forms of
commissioning on existing buildings have initial design
specifications as their goal, continuous commissioning seeks to
optimize the current operations—how the building is occupied and
used today accounting for changes since the original design. It's this
focus that resulted in an average measured utility savings of 20%
for 130 Federal buildings, documented in the DOE's
Continuous Commissioning Guidebook. |
So why doesn't everyone do continuous commissioning if the
benefits are this great? It's hard. It takes a lot of time and
labor. The operational data isn't easily available, and if you do
collect some data, the tools to use it ... let's just say they're
... limited. But that's all changed with EnergyWitness™.
Continuous Commissioning Made Practical
Finally, there's a tool available to do truly continuous
monitoring and
diagnostics of all your facility's operational data.
With EnergyWitness, you can review hundreds of trends in minutes and diagnose issues 50
– 100 times faster than relying on trend logs for your data.
There's no longer any excuse for the so-called continuous
commissioning services some firms provide that are little more than
an annual checklist review.
The labor involved in gathering information to fuel the
continuous commissioning process is dramatically reduced. This
changes the economics of continuous commissioning significantly,
lowering the total cost, reducing the time for ROI, and shifting the
cash flow curve to reach positive sooner.
For commissioning agents this means you can actually do
continuous commissioning profitably. For facilities directors, you
can do it affordably and reap the benefits sooner.
Data—and the Ability to Use It
EnergyWitness puts the data at your fingertips ... literally. And
we mean all the data—15 minute interval data from building
automation system(s), meters (advanced systems and manually read),
utilities, and weather. The data is centralized into a
data warehouse of facility
operations. In addition to the interval data, all utility bill
information (including demand data, billing rates, and meter reading
dates) should be included in the warehouse. From there, any interval data point, any trend line,
any billing information is
just a mouse-click or two away.
As much of an accomplishment as it is to just have the data, the
ability to use it effectively has been just as elusive in the past.
EnergyWitness allows the user to dynamically interact with the data in a stream
of consciousness manner. Need to scan back in time or add another
trend line—one click, one second, done. By comparison, reports
that some software products offer are static—if you want to look at
something different you create a new report, a process that wastes
time and derails the train of thought.
With the data and tools to interpret it, a continuous
commissioning engineer has the information to perform many of the
steps and meet the objectives of a successful continuous
commissioning program:
- Document the existing state of operations, space comfort,
and energy consumption
- Locate system issues, diagnose, and develop a plan to
resolve them
- Create new recommendation for control settings, set points,
etc.
- Identify and prioritize retrofit projects that will have the
greatest impact
- Measure and document improvements in system performance and
energy consumption
- Monitor ongoing operations to ensure all benefits are
sustained
Seeing is Believing
To see how EnergyWitness has been used in the continuous
commissioning process of some of our clients, we'd be happy to give
you a live demonstration. Just contact us by phone, 617-744-1091, or
e-mail at
info@intdatsys.com.
Continuous Commissioning® is a registered trademark of
Texas Engineering Experiment Station, The Texas A & M University System.
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