A Facilities Perspective

There's constant pressure to reduce operating expenses, and with 40% of a building's energy costs going to cooling and heating, it would seem to be a likely place to look for reductions. But accomplishing that can be difficult, especially when the building is older and might require costly and disruptive retrofits.

Most buildings today are not designed for energy efficiency – they were built during a time when energy was cheap and abundant. HVAC systems are not typically optimized for effective cooling or heating, and instead produce a constant output, no matter the load or temperatures. Their controls may be no more sophisticated than simple thermostats haphazardly placed where convenient. And they typically are islands unto themselves, with little to no oversight or coordination among multiple units.

Escalating costs for power and increased attention paid to carbon emissions are moving up the timeline for addressing these issues, however, and controlling your cooling plant effectively will soon become essential.

Manage Your Cooling Resources

Cooling resources should be an asset you can measure and manage, like other parts of your facility. And an effective energy management system should manage their utilization for you, automatically and optimally, while still leaving ultimate control in your hands.

An intelligent energy management system from Vigilent provides the capabilities you need to grab hold of your HVAC resources once and for all.

We'll start with a consultative evaluation of your facility, to accurately assess your needs, survey the facility and any unique requirements dictated by layout or airflow, and develop a placement plan for the thermal sensors. We use the most advanced wireless, mesh-networking sensor technology – the modules can be put into place with no disruption to the occupants, quickly and easily.

Our on-site energy consultant will connect the system to your air handlers – using industry-standard protocols such as BACnet – effectively converting them from CAV systems to VAV under direct computer control, or enabling VAV systems to deliver you additional savings. When launched, the system will profile your facility over a period of several hours, monitoring temperatures at the zone level and by specific location, and then develop a sophisticated model of cooling behavior that is used from then on for constant and continuous control.

It's important to remember that this system is a tool – it manages cooling at hundreds to thousands of points, something that no individual person could ever do. But it is always under your control – you set the operating parameters, you determine thresholds, and you can turn it on or off whenever you choose. We are confident, however, that you'll come to find it's something you don't even have to think about; it will hum along saving you money and ensuring your facility is properly cooled night and day, as you would hope.

Savings that Start Right Away

From the very moment you start up the system, it's reducing your cooling costs. Throttling fan speeds to meet demand, and channeling cold airflow to where it's needed, the system precisely matches capacity to demand. Savings of up to 50% of cooling energy costs are typical. And we provide the flexibility for you to handle this from your capital budget as a purchased system, or with no money out of pocket as a managed service where we share in your monthly savings, and you see a net positive impact to your bottom line.