Posted: September 28th, 2010 | Author: owen | Filed under: Competitions, Energy Management Best Practices | 3 Comments »
Over the week of August 30th to September 3rd, we conducted an energy savings campaign in our office building at 576 Seymour St.
We used the new Pulse Competitions module to track and display our savings. Our goal was to reduce our building’s weekly energy consumption by 3%. With the help of the other 5 companies in our building, we managed to exceed our goal and realize an 8.8% reduction, saving about 350 kWh.
The Building
576 Seymour Street is a 35,000 square foot, 6-storey, heritage office building located in downtown Vancouver. The building accommodates about 200 occupants at 6 companies ranging from jewellers and high-end audio visual equipment sales to law and architect offices.
For each day of the campaign, we encouraged building occupants to focus on a specific energy savings action.
Monday: Lighting reduction
On Monday, we targeted reducing excessive or unnecessary lighting. We offered a free lighting audit to interested companies, dimmed or turned off lights where it wasn’t needed and removed about 20 32W bulbs from ballasts that provided unnecessarily bright lighting. The actions netted fairly small savings, partially because the action ended up being spread across a few days and partially because most overhead lights were already off at this time of year.
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Posted: September 10th, 2010 | Author: Julius | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Brian Branting, Energy Manager from BC’s School District #79, joined us for a very interesting webinar on reducing energy consumption in schools and school districts (we apologize for a few rough spots in the audio of the recording). Brian presented how 30 facilities in his district reduced their energy consumption by nearly 20% for the 2009/2010 fiscal year, which amounted to a cost avoidance of over $250,000 on their 2009/2010 budget. The two big keys to his success were establishing a successful energy conservation behaviour program that encouraged and supported school staff and students to reduce energy use, as well as optimizing the schools’ heating schedules for greater efficiency.
We had a very engaged audience who peppered us with many questions at this webinar, and unfortunately we ran out of time before we had the chance to answer them all. Brian was nice enough to send us his answers to the unanswered questions via email, so now we can present the entire Q&A session here on our blog:
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576 Seymour Street is a 35,000 square foot, 6-storey, heritage office building located in downtown Vancouver. The building accommodates about 200 occupants at 6 companies ranging from jewellers and high-end audio visual equipment sales to law and architect offices.