Login
It's 10:00 PM. Do you know what your building is doing? Is the economizer set to maximum outside air? Has the lighting control system, be it human or machine, switched circuits off in unoccupied areas? What percentage of your personal computers is running?
When it comes to buildings, lack of knowledge usually means wasted power and energy. Few building owners realize precisely how their building systems operate. Over time building systems degrade, or worse, never perform as designed. An instrumented diagnostic examination rarely fails to identify energy conservation opportunities.
In late 1993, a large California electric utility company launched a tool-lending library to assist building managers and design professionals in measuring the real-time performance of their buildings. This service offers access to hand-held instruments, dataloggers, and technical support. The library's instruments have proven useful in discovering control problems, in isolating systems and equipment responsible for excessive demand and energy use, and in providing measured baselines for energy-conserving retrofits. The service has been augmented by application-specific training seminars, guidelines and software tools.
This paper presents two years of experience with the tool-lending library and describes the intent and context of the lending library's approach, results from field applications in the form of case examples, and lessons learned in the early years of the program's operation.