Take 550 County buildings with 7.2 million square feet across thousands of square miles. Add different stand-alone building control systems for electricity, gas and water at nearly every building and what do you get?
A scene all too common for large organizations – a slow, costly, reactive approach to resolving facility system issues, and ultimately, reduced efficiency of these utilities at each site.
But now the County of San Diego has designed and implemented a new smart building automation system that ties the various facilities together so they can be monitored and controlled remotely from one location. It’s saving energy, lowering utility costs and preventing problems before they occur. To date it’s saved $58,000 in utility costs at the South Bay Regional Center. Full County implementation could save as much as $1.4 million a year in electrical usage alone.
“There is nothing in the California public sector, facility management arena that comes close to this,” said General Services Chief of Operations Mike Urquhart. “We are leading the way with an innovative application of existing technology.”
Mission control, so to speak, takes place in what is jokingly called the “Bat Cave”– a small room at the County Operations Center in Kearny Mesa full of computer monitors and screens. This confined windowless area gives a team of two technicians and a supervisor a big picture view of the buildings on board the system. And it also allows them the capability to drill down to the smallest detail.
Technicians can click to a specific building, see the floor plans in 3D and check diagrams of the chilled water, heating/hot water and lighting systems. They can monitor how the individual components are operating, from air handlers down to their air flow valves. Significant measurements are updated every 15 seconds.
Where once a complaint meant calling maintenance, possibly sending someone to the site, finding the problem, diagnosing it, and the actual repair taking many hours if not days, now the Bat Cave technicians can detect where a malfunction is taking place and repair it, either remotely or by contacting the building’s maintenance crew.
In one case, complaints came in from the El Cajon Family Resource Center that it was too hot. From Kearny Mesa, Bat Cave technicians checked the different components of the HVAC system, found clogged filters in the cold water loop, directed local staff to flush them out and restored flow to the building in two hours.
The system also alerts technicians to malfunctions or impending problems by email or text 24/7 and allows them to manage issues by laptop from home, the site or out in the field.
The pilot project started in August 2013 at the South Bay Regional Center. Startup costs were $440,000 but now with the system in place, the cost decreases for add-ons. The County Operations Center campus in Kearny Mesa is three times larger but it cost only $140,000 to add 12 buildings.
The El Cajon and Southeast Family Resource Centers are on board the system along with the Lincoln Acres Library. Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility will be added later this year.
Beyond the gee-whiz aspect, the smart system addresses one of the most expensive operating costs in facilities: utilities.
“We are always trying to optimize our consumption of electricity, gas and water.” said Urquhart.
At the South Bay Regional Center alone, electricity and natural gas use fell 8 percent and water use decreased 3 percent the first year. Those savings are expected to grow as the Smart system expands to more County facilities.
The continuous monitoring and two-year archiving system means data analytics can be used to save even more energy. Technicians can also cut back on non-essential power during stage 1 alerts, saving electricity, lowering County utility rates and leading to possible financial incentives. The data is used to qualify for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED standards on environmentally friendly buildings too.
The system is still in its infancy in terms of all its capabilities but it’s already attracting attention. The U.S. Navy recently visited the Bat Cave to see how it works and came away with ideas on how it could apply to them.
