By: Jason Jepsen, Senior Energy Systems Engineer, Blueprint Power

Seemingly rigid and simple, buildings are complex, dynamic structures that support continually evolving tenant demands, local regulations, and technologies. Balancing these demands is a herculean task for building chiefs and operators, necessitating reason and compromise, mechanical aptitude, social psychology, engineering, data, adaptability, and diligence.

Many buildings are not running in an optimized or intended state. The engineers who devised the systems and original sequences may be long gone. Operators, in the interest of protecting the building owners’ investments and assets, must address tenant complaints, broken equipment, and system disruptions. Factor in energy efficiency goals, demand response programs, carbon reduction regulations, and increasingly severe weather conditions, and it’s easy to understand how a building, or campus of buildings, may be running sub-optimally.

To manage this range of activity, building operators often adopt a manual operational strategy. This can work well for many building objectives, but it is largely reactive and inefficient in nature. Financial limitations can also impact a building’s performance. However, there are several fundamental actions building owners and operators can take to establish or restore optimal operation. These steps don’t need to be expensive or burdensome, and they can make it easier for operators to manage important building functions and environmental factors.

Optimizing the Building Management System

Optimizing use of the Building Management System (BMS) or Building Automation System (BAS) is essential to facility improvement initiatives, supporting increased control, operational efficiency, fault detection and diagnostics (FDD), maintenance scheduling, repair identification, occupant health, and energy and sustainability reporting. Ensuring the BMS is robust in network and service, comprehensive in features, and regularly maintained is a top priority. BMS maintenance is typically done by a BMS vendor or contractor and can include making program adjustments, establishing and updating trending and reports, integrating new equipment and sensors, ensuring network topology is correct and efficient, replacing or upgrading field panels and devices, and creating new graphical user interfaces. These actions empower the operators to run their buildings well, respond to issues, and maintain visibility of operations.

"You can’t manage what you don’t measure”

A building’s BMS also provides critical data that can be physical (from a sensor or device) or virtual (calculated from physical points). Trending is the collection of these point values over time or change-of-value intervals, and it provides visibility into equipment, systems, performance, and efficiency. Without this data, investing in building improvements is an educated guess at best. Data analysis establishes the state of operations, quantifies the impact of improvement measures, and informs next steps. Making data-informed decisions, reviewing data post-change, and adjusting actions per the data is a systematic and trackable process. Over time, the data will tell the building’s story, both materially and operationally.

Integrating more quality points into the BMS enhances trend data, graphics, and control programs to improve information accuracy and task precision. Integrating sub-points into the BMS further enables equipment and system level insights, empowering operators to make better operational and mechanical (maintenance) decisions. With sufficient sensor and device data, building managers can optimize BMS control sequences. These actions and features should be part of the BMS scope of work or contract and may be completed as ongoing maintenance.

Using Automatic Control Programs

Automatic control programs for daily control, demand response events, unexpected occupancy changes, or extreme weather conditions are an important function of a building’s operation. Automatic control helps ensure predictable and consistent operation, reduces manual error, improves demand response performance, frees up personnel resources, and enables precise, energy-efficient control sequences. Often, optimized control relies on the high-quality sensors and points of integration mentioned above. There are many resources available to inform optimized and automatic control.  For example, an energy engineer familiar with the building and operation can provide detailed operation sequences for controlling the HVAC systems. The BMS programmer can then implement programming to support those sequences and a commissioning agent can test, confirm, and document that the control programs function per the sequences. After commissioning, an energy manager can collect trend data and conduct an assessment using an analysis program that helps identify tweaks and tuning necessary for persistent performance of comfort and energy efficiency.

There are many benefits of investing in and fully utilizing a building’s data and operational systems. Energy efficiency, enabled through sensors, trend data, and optimized programming supports reduced operating expenses and carbon emissions. Occupant health and comfort are enhanced by proper sequences of operation, precise control programming, and data feedback. Resiliency and demand response is improved by energy efficiency and more responsive equipment and systems. Data informs maintenance requirements, equipment condition, and system operating limits. All these facets support a building operator’s ability to respond to changing conditions, including occupancy rates and weather.

Managing the Hierarchy of Building Systems

These fundamental actions support each other, one providing the basis and support for the next. The image below is a simple representation of the relationships and priority of the discussed actions. Added on the end are grid interactive energy systems - beneficial assets that buildings can incorporate on the path toward less energy expense and more income potential.

Building owners can enhance the operators’ impact by fully utilizing the systems and technologies already present in their buildings. A robust network with quality sensors, devices, and interactive systems, combined with regular process review and optimization, can drive efficiency in building operations and more easily adapt as the building’s environment evolves.