Intentionally or unintentionally, a building’s scheduling may deviate from its optimum settings. If left unchecked, improper scheduling can wreak havoc on a building’s operational profile, impacting energy budgets, comfort conditions, equipment longevity, and your ability to meet performance standards or service-level agreements (SLAs).

To make optimizing building scheduling easier, Atrius has tools to speed up the identification of buildings with potentially errant scheduling and visualize the extent of their scheduling irregularities. When used together, these tools help you deliver quality comfort conditions and cut energy and lifecycle costs by reducing how often your lighting, heating, or cooling systems operate.

If you manage many buildings, then a campus- or portfolio-wide comparison can provide a useful view into the top-consuming buildings where you stand to reap the greatest savings.

Portfolio Drift app shows how individual buildings contribute to the overall performance of your portfolio—and how they “drift” over time. The graph displays the quantity of a metric via the size of a cell, and percent change from the previous period via the color of a cell.

Above: In this Portfolio Drift graph of this month compared to the previous month, Austin Warehouse and Mountain View Lab C (both red) have significantly increased consumption. Because of the size of Mountain View Lab C, its savings potential is greater than Austin Warehouse.

Alternatively, the Comparisons app shows a simple ranked comparison of buildings according to total cost or consumption. Use these visualizations to guide and prioritize your investigation into buildings’ scheduling.

If you’ve found the top-consuming buildings, or the buildings exhibiting the most “drift”, then you're ready to begin examining their consumption or demand trends. Follow these steps to get started:

Select 'Save'. Repeat this process for your other buildings of interest.

With these visualizations in hand, you can now ask the following questions:

Time-of-day scheduling ensures that a building curtails usage during partially occupied periods and shuts down during unoccupied periods, such as at night. If properly scheduled, nightly setbacks should also recede during the morning hours to meet building demands during the day.

Day-of-week scheduling ensures that a building curtails usage on partially occupied days and shuts down on unoccupied days, such as weekends and holidays. Depending on building type, higher or lower baseloads may be observed, regardless of occupancy. For instance, a grocery store will always have 24/7 refrigeration requirements.

Above: Prominent dark-green regions on the far left and right indicate that time-of-day scheduling is in place, while dark-green horizontal bands on the weekends indicate that day-of-week scheduling is in place.

For another way of visualizing deviations from what is normal during weekdays or weekends, go to the Load Profile app.

Building automation systems should be programmed to respond to seasonal variations in temperature. For a building with electric cooling and gas heating, during warmer months there should be a correlation between higher electricity consumption and cooling degree days, while during cooler months there should be a correlation between lower electricity consumption and heating degree days.

Above: Red and yellow bands on the top left indicate higher electricity consumption, which correlate with the blue bands on the right showing the number of cooling degree days.

To show HDD/CDD on a heat map graph, go to the Heat Map app.

Temporary overrides are commonly implemented to accommodate special situations, such as an event or after-hours maintenance. Overrides should usually be set according to expected building occupancy levels during those times. Most importantly, they should be reverted as soon as possible to the prior scheduling settings.

Above: After being implemented, the temporary override had not been reverted. Consequently, electricity use soared for several days during evening hours before the schedule was eventually reverted.

New equipment often requires an extensive commissioning process, particularly if it is introduced into an existing building system with many complex parts. Include an evaluation of building scheduling before and soon after any maintenance or replacement of equipment.

Above: After installation, the HVAC system does not seem to follow any apparent schedule. Either it is not properly interfacing with the schedule, or there is more fine-tuning required for the equipment.

Malfunctioning equipment can lead to more than just comfort complaints—it can drastically reduce the equipment’s useful life. For instance, if an HVAC unit appears to be “short cycling” in rapid succession, this behavior may point to other undetected problems, such as broken sensors or leaky valves. If left unchecked, costly equipment failure may occur.

Above: The HVAC system is turning on in the middle of the night on Sundays. This suggests that it needs to run harder and longer to raise the temperature from the weekend set point of 55 deg F to the workweek set point of 68 deg F on Monday morning. Equipment may need cleaned, tuned, or even replaced.

Whether or not you are directly involved in building scheduling decisions, there are several ways you can take action:

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