Why Smart Facilities Managers Don’t Wait for an Audit to Save Energy
Verdigris explains why having your buildings energy data makes for less worrisome audits.
Note: This article was published when Verdigris focused on commercial and industrial energy management. Today, Verdigris provides electrical intelligence for AI data centers.
How long has it been since you had a professional energy audit? Chances are it’s been a year or longer, because energy audits are time consuming and can be costly.
Energy audits can feel productive because multiple small issues with energy efficiency accumulate between visits, making the potential savings from the audit look huge. But the truth is, those energy savings should have been achieved the entire time.
Energy auditing depends on an accumulation of problems in a building between visits:
- Equipment becoming less efficient with wear and tear
- Technologies becoming obsolete and meriting upgrade
- Programmatic changes like automated lighting and temperature set points being altered by maintenance staff
- Behavioral changes in building usage due to staff turnover or occupancy changes
Even though energy audits are a great kick-start to an energy efficiency initiative, the best way to maintain the lowest energy usage is to monitor continuously. With continuous energy monitoring, facilities managers and chief engineers can catch most of the problems a professional would find, but nip them in the bud.
By using energy data, facilities managers maintain efficiency gains by:
- Identifying equipment energy consumption increases over time
- Receiving advice on technology replacements, based solely on the energy data
- Catching signs of inefficient use like spikes, short cycling, or other signatures of equipment being off spec
- Spotting patterns in inefficient behavior, like lights being left on overnight