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Anywhere on Campus OUTDOOR FURNITURE Portable, Stationary, and Accessible Tables throughout the University of California and California State University systems. Conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, "Monitoring-Based Commissioning: Benchmarking Analysis of 24 UC/CSU/IOU Projects" was published in June of 2009. The study's authors defi ne the concept Team Benches for the Athletic Field and the goal of the study in this way: Commissioning is "a 'soft' process of verifying performance and design intent and correcting defi ciencies. Through an evaluation of a series of fi eld projects, this report explores the effi cacy of an emerging refi nement of this practice known as moni- toring-based commissioning (MBCx)." For the study, technicians connected for any Location on Campus Benches Collecting trash doesn't have to be ugly sensors to the building systems in all 24 buildings and sent performance data back to a central monitoring point. By monitor- ing the data and looking for changes that might indicate a problem, they identifi ed 1,120 defi ciencies and developed what they called "interventions" to correct the defi ciencies. During the course of the study, 65 percent of the HVAC systems developed defi ciencies — the highest percentage in the study. Air handling and distribution developed defi ciencies half of the buildings in the study, followed by cooling plants (29 percent), heating plants (24 percent), and terminal units (24 percent). By fi nding and correcting these defi - Bike Racks — durable, secure parking ® ciencies as soon as they developed, instead of waiting for a scheduled maintenance visit, the technicians cut utility costs sub- stantially. In fact, the study found enough savings to pay back the $2.9M cost of building the monitor-based commission- ing infrastructure for all 24 buildings in 30 months. After the payback period, a school can put the savings into the classroom. Out of the Lab, Into the Field Today, fi rms provide MBCx as a service, monitoring building systems, identifying defi ciencies, and advising owners how to correct the problems. "We generate weekly reports for clients 26 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / NOVEMBER 2012 about building system performance," says Jay Enck, co-founder and chief technical offi cer with Commissioning and Green Building Solutions (CxGBS), Inc., a Duluth, GA-based fi rm that specializes in MBCx and other sustainable building solutions. CxGBS has been providing these services for 10 years now. Not long ago, the company began offering MBCx services to educational institutions. "Colleges and universities have only just started to get into monitoring-based commissioning," continues Enck. "It isn't widely used by colleges and universities yet, but there are several early adopters." One CxGBS university client has 63 buildings. "We collect over four million pieces of data per day for that client," says Enck. "We analyze the data and report on operational issues." Enck also says that MBCx services should include data analysis, noting that some users collect and store data but haven't begun to analyze and use it. Clients that use data provided by CxGBS have found substantial savings. "On the high end, we've gotten utility cost reduc- tions of 60 to 70 percent," Enck says. "The average is 30 percent." There's more. "Energy savings is a relatively small portion of the benefi ts of MBCx," continues Enck. "It enables you to use human resources — labor — more effi ciently. Your technicians won't have to go to the site to fi gure out what is wrong, go back to the shop to get parts and then return to the jobsite. "It also enables reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Certain kinds of data can warn of potential equipment failure and enable you to prevent a failure with maintenance or new equipment." Still more to come: As utility provid- ers upgrade to a smart grid, MBCx data will enable facility directors to program automatic triggers based on usage and the weather to cut systems back during peak hours. "It will take a few years to get there," Enck says. "But that's where MBCx is going." CPM WWW.PLANNING4EDUCATION.COM THE NEXT STEP IN CUTTING UTILITY COSTS