One of the biggest and tricky challenges of any building energy management is to decide where to start. This management can be quite tough if you own one property.
Building energy management
It is also challenging for managers of large portfolios. So there are some easiest ways that can help you to improve your building energy efficiency.
Data is your best friend:
To get on the right track, undoubtedly, the data is your best friend. If the data is presented and analyzed correctly and properly, surprisingly, it will be greatly a powerful tool in case of identifying where to start on your building energy efficiency. It will not only let you identify where to start, but it also helps in providing the track and quantify performance improvements over time.
After hours of energy use:
If we talk about buildings including a range of sectors and industries in which offices, education, and government buildings are included, we will come to know that buildings are on average empty for around 72% of the year.
It makes sense when most people clock off in the evenings, holidays, and on weekends. So a building is empty more than it is occupied. And there is nothing wrong when a building is empty so long as it is consuming energy while sitting idle.
Research shows that a building consumes a significant amount of energy even when it is empty. So this is one of the most imperative considerations when it comes to building energy efficiency.
Calculating the cost:
When it comes to considering cost, it is essential to take into account both the environmental and financial implications. The cost of environment is quite easy to work on, but the financial cost is quite tricky to calculate because it depends on the tariff for each building. So it is important to calculate the cost of the energy being used by the building in terms of both environmentally as well as financially.
Use of energy:
So it is essential to identify where all the out-of-hours energy is going as it will vary from building to building. But with the help of sub-metering data, we can easily make some informed guesses.
In a building energy management system, there are three main energy users, including HVAC system, lighting, and plug loads. So in order to improve the energy efficiency of building energy management, you should start from these points and try to manage each thing.