Author: bldgcontrols

You can save money by using building intelligence to reduce maintenance costs and target special needs like winterization. Regular maintenance makes equipment last longer and reduces repair costs, and checking in, as winter has arrived, is imperative to ensure all equipment functions properly and optimally throughout the harsh season.

Targeting Operations and Equipment for Winterizing

You can save money and improve productivity by properly winterizing your operations. You’ll reduce chances of damage caused by freezing temperatures, equipment malfunctions, and enable employees to get more done, more efficiently.

Start by preparing your building. Ensure seals are tight on windows and doors. Inspect the building’s insulation. Fill in gaps and add thickness, covering spaces where necessary. You need a minimum of four inches of insulation in walls, ceilings, and attics. Cover air conditioning vents with custom-fitted wood or plastic seals. Prepare your equipment, especially the furnace and backup generators, with fresh oil and fluids. Check coolant levels on refrigeration equipment and cooling mechanisms that keep manufacturing equipment from overheating.

The outside of your building needs attention, too. Clean its roof drains, catch basins, and storm drains. Keep them clear all year round because in winter, precipitation, especially snow, can clog the system. A clogged system causes snow to accumulate on the roof. This extra weight can cause leaks, holes, and cave and.

Move your fleet inside. You’ll save yourself from having to dig out your vehicles, prevent damage from winter precipitation and winds, and preserve engine health by keeping each vehicle’s fluids from freezing and turning solid. Detach and properly store attachments not used in cold weather months to prevent joint and hinge damage. Check fluid levels and top off or replace each vehicle’s engine, hydraulic, final drive, and transmission fluids.

Store and recharge batteries indoors. Keeping them warm improves performance.

Inflate all tires and check them regularly to ensure they are properly inflated. Tires deflate more quickly in cold weather. Check each vehicle’s owner manual for specific recommendations. For instance, Caterpillar recommends inflating tires on its equipment with dry nitrogen gas (DNG). Using DNG helps eliminate ice crystals from forcing open the tire’s valve stem. Of course, an open valve stem causes deflation.

How Performance Solutions Can Help

We offer solutions of automated building intelligence for efficient upkeep your building and equipment. Our products enable you to make maintenance and replacement decisions based upon hard data from all your organization’s sources, including siloed metering systems. You’ll be able to defer (unnecessary) maintenance and upgrade truly necessary items as needed. We turn your company’s automated data from machinery, equipment, and building elements into actionable, analyzed data in a comprehensive form. We conduct a gap analysis and provide the expertise and technology to provide a complete, constantly up-to-date picture of your operations and equipment. You can cut costs and improve efficiency through automation. Contact us to learn how easy it is to save money, extend equipment life, and reduce building wear and tear.

Energy efficiency and increased performance is the name of the game in building improvements. There is currently a massive opportunity across the country to upgrade systems and save a significant amount of money. New technologies are allowing serious energy savings in buildings that lead to 10-15% cost reductions in monthly bills. Those savings flow straight to the bottom line, increasing the valuation of the property. One of the most important improvements your building can make is with automated systems.

Building automation systems work by first establishing a “smart” grid internally. This links the HVAC, electricity, water, security, entrances, and other building components on the same network. The network can be viewed through a dashboard, programmed for automation, and controlled manually.

Crucially, the system works to lower energy consumption automatically. When the building is not occupied or certain areas are empty, energy use in those spaces automatically decreases. There is less air conditioning in the summer and less heat in the winter. Using detectors, historical patterns, and smart algorithms, the system learns how to optimize energy consumption. This automatically leads to lower energy bills while still maintaining comfortable conditions.

Using an automation system leads to happier tenants and more affordable utility costs. The savings can then be reinvested in further automated performance systems to find building operation inefficiencies elsewhere. We provide analysis, consultation, and management of facility improvement projects, including automated systems. For more information, please contact us.

In the first part of this series, we introduced how proper employee training on building automation can maximize both ROI and performance. You’ve finished your training, but the process isn’t over, as the reflection and evaluation periods afterwards are likely some of the most important stages to analyze current situations, instill proper actions, and make plans.

Stage Three – After Training

What happens when training is over? Like a follow-through on a golfer’s swing, a good follow-through after absorbing new knowledge is imperative. Just because training is over does not mean that everyone simply resumes their everyday work routines. Management can only hope employees take what they learned during training and apply it, so it is important to analyze and plan a next course of action. A good training session is one that is an ongoing project.

Management helped to identify employees’ development needs and organizational goals and how they fit with the company and operations. Now that training is over, management should now be able to compare the employee’s work with their identified needs and the company’s goals. By doing this, management can assess the effectiveness of the training and what efficiencies can be improved. Additionally, this also helps management decide on any future training by getting feedback on how effective the training sessions were to their employees and what topics are still unclear or can be further developed and put into practice.

Best Practices for Evaluations

Any management and/or trainers should ask these questions. This will help all higher-ups properly evaluate just how effective training was and to find areas of improvement on future sessions:

• Was the training done on-time and within the allotted time frame?
• How effective was the trainer at engaging the audience?
• Did the training properly meet all legal, regulatory, and safety requirements?
• How did the training affect employee morale and performance? Did it affect it positively?
• What common questions came up during training that can be addressed next time?
• Were solutions to those common questions properly put into use afterwards?
• Were all goals and weaknesses addressed?

By now, employees should understand that building automation increases efficiency and delivers results when properly applied. With proper training, employees understand their role better in the overall scheme of operations, and better work and productivity can follow. Contact us to learn more about facility management, training, and building automation.

You may think you can’t afford to spend money increasing the efficiency of your current facility, but the truth often is you can’t afford not to. Piecemeal attempts at energy efficiency may save money or improve operations temporarily, but to really reap the benefits of energy cost reductions, you need a strategic energy and maintenance program that takes an overall look at your unique facility. Every aspect of building operations should be considered, from the small individual changes (which can sum up to large savings) to the overall intelligence system of your operation that controls energy. Your systems should be up-to-date, offering transparency and providing crucial real-time data to analyze and take action on improving your system.

Critical examination of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems is vital. Inefficiencies such as air leaks are common. Many times, mechanical components are outdated and need replacement, and those replacements can improve efficiency from a functionality and systems perspective.

A building intelligence platform can coordinate all energy consumption in your facility from one central location to alert you to any deviations in energy use, by monitoring, analyzing, and reporting in real time the fluctuations in consumption. Perhaps you have older equipment, such as cooling towers or exchangers, not operating at full efficiency. Minor changes in computer practices, such as turning monitors off when not in use, can make surprisingly significant differences. Is your lighting the most efficient? What are your water use practices? Do you have low-flow toilets and faucets? Are electronics that use power cut off when not needed?

After a complete, professional energy audit, it is often found that upgrades improve the bottom lines of any entity. The changes pay for themselves in both the short and long runs, along with lightening the company’s footprint on the environment.

A comprehensive plan can be your greatest asset, where developing a plan can save thousands on costs and energy consumption, while restoring greater control to the organization. We use our energy knowledge to help give you that control by designing a comprehensive plan to maximize both your economic and environmental efficiency. For more information, contact us today.

One of the costs of doing business is that utility bill that comes at the end of the month to run your building operations. There’s no getting around it; you need to have power to keep your facility running. But do you need to consume as much power as you are? And if you don’t, what areas can you trim usage, reduce waste, and minimize costs?

Work Smarter, Not Harder

The problem with reducing waste consumption comes if you take on the challenge without a plan. You could spend a lot more money and resources than your savings will recuperate, or worse, you could take cost-saving measures that don’t cut down waste and forces more money expenditures, which could compound the problems. To avoid this, evaluate your operations and collect data to make sure the solutions you’re examining will actually have an impact on your problem areas.

Perform the necessary evaluations to get your business back on track. Energy audits and strategizing will make you look at all parts of building operations, from how much electricity lights use, to how much energy your appliances draw, to where inefficiencies are with HVAC systems, and more. All important aspects should be tallied and accounted for. Once you have hard data and numbers, it is important to analyze and create a plan that will work with your existing systems, giving you immediate savings with minimum amount of replacement and other overhead costs. Your goal is to be better and understand the tools and equipment with which you work and use them more efficiently.

For more information on Performance Solutions, and how we can help you reduce your resource consumption, decrease building operation expenditures, and find new cost saving opportunities, contact us today!