Project Goal
The goal of this project is to improve continuous performance monitoring systems in large commercial buildings in order to provide operators with access to improved information to operate buildings more efficiently and reduce other operating costs.
Background
Building commissioning and related studies have shown that numerous operational and control problems exist in most buildings. One approach to improving the identification of such problems, and hence facilitating their repair, is to provide continuous performance monitoring. This approach has been shown to produce practical benefits in daily operations by allowing the identification of problems such as equipment cycling or inefficient operating strategies.
Current building control system installations typically have very limited data collection, archiving and visualization capabilities, largely because these capabilities have not been valued and specified by design engineers. This can be seen as symptomatic of a wider disconnect between building design and operations. This project seeks to create 'market pull' for performance monitoring capabilities in commercial buildings by demonstrating the capabilities of commercially available technology from a range of different vendors, assessing its costs and benefits and developing a specification that includes cost-effective capabilities that are valued by building owners and property managers.
Specification Document
A primary product of this project has been the development of a set of specifications for continuous performance monitoring systems that can be easily adapted and routinely used by a variety of organizations for both new construction and control system retrofits. The specifications document below can be downloaded for review.
- Specifications Guide for Performance Monitoring Systems (1.8 MB PDF)
Acknowledgements
This research is sponsored by the California Energy Commission Public Interest Energy Research Program (PIER) and the Building Technologies Program of the US Department of Energy.
Contact Information
Philip Haves
(510) 486-6512
Rob Hitchcock
(530) 295-9433