If you’re concerned about your building’s energy use, and particularly if you want to lower it, you’ll need to pay attention to its systems. Not just when something breaks, but all the time. Technology can do that, allowing data to be collected so that systems can be adjusted and monitored for performance. Darren Johnson, account manager at Bright Power, an energy management company, explains how the smart technology works and how buildings can take advantage of it. Darren Johnson is interviewed by Carol Ott for Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
If you’re concerned about your building’s energy use, and particularly if you want to lower it, you’ll need to pay attention to its systems. Not just when something breaks, but all the time. Technology can do that, allowing data to be collected so that systems can be adjusted and monitored for performance. Darren Johnson, account manager at Bright Power, an energy management company, explains how the smart technology works and how buildings can take advantage of it. Darren Johnson is interviewed by Carol Ott for Habitat Magazine.
Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!
Carol Ott: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about problems that have been solved in New York's co-op and condo buildings. I'm Carol Ott, publisher and editor in chief of Habitat Magazine. My guest today is Darren Johnson, an account manager at Bright Power, a provider of energy and water management services for the real estate industry.
One of the most challenging problems for co-ops and condos today is gauging the health of their building systems. It matters, because if equipment is in poor health or not functioning properly, you'll get stuck when you try to bring your energy usage down. Darren is here to explain what's available to monitor your building systems.
Welcome, Darren.
[00:01:25] Darren Johnson: Thank you, Carol. It's nice to be here.
[00:01:27] Carol Ott: Most buildings have supers that take care of the equipment. I understand there is technology to help with that. Give me a sense of what is out there that will help a super and therefore a building owner.
[00:01:42] Darren Johnson: Today with the advancement in technology, there are wireless sensors that attach to different pieces of equipment, to monitor space temperature, water temperature, various different things inside of a building that normally can't be monitored on just an individual basis.
[00:02:01] Carol Ott: I've heard of something called BIS: building information systems, which monitor your building systems. And now I've also heard about RTEM, which is real time energy management. What's the difference?
[00:02:17] Darren Johnson: A BMS, a building management system, allows you to manipulate or change the settings on equipment. That is something that site staff would use in case something came up, there was a service disruption, or something changed and they needed to make an adjustment. They can do it from their computer, or they can do it from their cell phone. The traditional way is that staff would manually make an adjustment to the equipment; BMS allows you to do that remotely so that you don't have to be in the room where that piece of equipment is existing.
[00:02:54] Carol Ott: And that system has sensors.
[00:02:57] Darren Johnson: It does, but usually those sensors are limited to the specific pieces of equipment that you are trying to manipulate, so you're going to have them on the more complex, larger pieces of equipment. Real time energy management (RTEM) utilizes those BMS sensors. That is a part of what real time energy management is going to be tapping into, but it's also to be able to add further sensors.
If you think about large buildings, you're going to have mechanical ventilation. You may have a cooling tower, a chiller, multiple boilers, much larger pumps and motors. You could have a cogeneration system or a separate domestic hot water system.
A BMS is not going to be tied into all of that equipment and all of those systems. It's going to be very specific. Real time energy management leverages that BMS system and then expands upon it. You're creating a bigger network of information that you're monitoring outside of what the BMS is.
[00:04:04] Carol Ott: What exactly am I going to get if I have installed an RTEM service? What are we learning?
[00:04:14] Darren Johnson: If you think about the old way, how you found out if equipment had failed, stopped working or there's a service disruption was by having residents call. Maybe the water temperature's too cold, or it's too hot. But you find out after the fact; everything is reactive.
What real time energy management allows you to do is to think about it from a big data standpoint. You're collecting a lot of information, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. That allows an energy engineer to analyze that data and have a better, more thorough understanding of the performance of the building. And it allows you to create a benchmark to say, “Okay, this is where we are, so let's create some parameters around that performance benchmark.” That way we can see if there's variations that take place, so that you're going to be able to see before equipment starts to fail.
And so it allows it to be almost predictive, in the sense that you can see things that are happening, and so if there is a service disruption, it's going to be either eliminated if you catch it early enough or it's going to be minimized when something just fails completely.
[00:05:29] Carol Ott: Is the point of RTEM to tell you before equipment fails, or is the point that somebody does something with this data so you can say I want to bring my energy profile down?
[00:05:44] Darren Johnson: It's a combination of both. It's not only about minimizing and eliminating service disruptions, it's also about being able to optimize performance. It allows you to identify inefficiencies. Let's say you have three boilers, and all three are running at varying times. What you do with real time energy management is you identify that, okay, I don't need all three boilers running. I only need one and maybe two. And maybe the third can be alternated at some point. What are recommendations that we can provide to the site staff? To be able to say, Okay, this adjustment needs to be made.
[00:06:28] Carol Ott: Is this system geared for only large buildings or does it also work for smaller buildings?
[00:06:34] Darren Johnson: It is appropriate for all size buildings. The service is going to be geared towards the size of the building and the complexity of the equipment and the systems that are in there. If you think about small buildings, most of them tend to have a heating plant and a boiler that's providing space heating and domestic hot water. What they may have as far as real time energy management is only a system that's specifically geared towards monitoring the heating plant.
A lot of buildings in New York City are steam, so you might have indoor temperature sensors in a sampling of the apartments. You're monitoring the performance of the boiler. You're monitoring the domestic hot water. But it is still very useful if you think about how you're going to be able to continue to reduce that in your carbon emission. These smaller buildings, you can have 75% of the energy associated with that one system. RTEM has a very practical application to smaller buildings; it's just that it's going to be a smaller, scaled-down version of what larger buildings would have installed.
[00:07:42] Carol Ott: Give me an idea of the cost of these kinds of systems when you're a small building or a large building.
[00:07:51] Darren Johnson: The cost varies, without a doubt. You may be talking about something that is potentially $500 to $700 a month, let's say, for a small building, where you're going to have somebody who is not site staff, to have a partner that is going to be looking at this information and providing feedback. It could be anywhere from that range all the way up to $1,500 to $2,000, depending on the complexity and the size of the building and the installed equipment that you're monitoring. As you can imagine, the more that you're adding into the real time energy management, then the more expense.
Then there may be some services that are less. The question is what is going to be the amount of interaction that you're going to be receiving. As with anything, you get what you pay for.
[00:08:45] Carol Ott: If I, as a board director, buy one of these RTEM systems, monitor this for a year, and tighten up my ship, in essence, what is the next step? We're all operating efficiently, but still my carbon emissions are high. It's not going to tell me what's the next piece of equipment I should buy or what I should replace in my building, correct?
[00:09:10] Darren Johnson: It can. It depends on the partner that you have. If you have your energy engineer as your partner, then that engineer is going to help you think about replacement equipment. How do you potentially reposition the building? Because everybody knows that the conversation today is about electrification. The question for a lot of buildings may not be necessarily, how do I electrify tomorrow, but how do I transition to electrification in the future? This is information that an engineer is going to have that will be able to better provide that guidance. That is very important in order to be able to make the best decisions and to prudently invest in these types of large capital investments. When you spend that money on something that has a 20- or 30-year expected useful life, you want to make sure that you're more than confident that you have made the right decision.
[00:10:05] Carol Ott: Okay. Thank you very much. Great food for thought, that's for sure.
[00:10:09] Darren Johnson: You're welcome. Thank you.