A renovated data collection system for on-campus utilities could soon allow Facilities Management to keep university buildings more efficient and sustainable.
Facilities Management will begin to create a campuswide “real-time data acquisition system” this June, meter shop supervisor Don Hill said. The new system will wirelessly access data from on-campus buildings at any time of the day, allowing for more accurate energy usage readings.
While often small and unnoticed, this university has more than a thousand different meters measuring various utilities to analyze how a building is functioning. Both inside and out, meters can track electricity, water, steam or room temperature.
With accurate measurements, Facilities Management can quickly find and solve maintenance issues and waste fewer resources, Hill said. The change could lower on-campus energy usage by 5 percent and save the university $1.6 million a year, he said.
Before, meters didn’t gather data until midnight, so information would always be a day old, he said. They also depended on manual meter checks, which happen monthly. Because of this, if water is continually running, Facilities Management might not catch it for a month, he said.
“The thing is, you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Hill said. “By putting some real-time focus on the energy, we are hoping to impact it.”
To gather this real-time data, the meter shop will install a server called Obvius, a wireless program that allows the shop to gather information more quickly and helps establish a “meshed network” of meters, university metering mechanic John Radl said.
“It’s a vehicle to get the information from the meter to the server,” Radl said.
Additional information is used as a “diagnostic tool” to solve maintenance problems within heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, said John Vucci, a Facilities Management associate director. By keeping better track of utility usage, Facilities Management can also make sure the university is not using too much energy, which could cause outages and other problems, he said.
“Even if you have data, you still need to be doing something with it,” Vucci said. “By evaluating the data acquisition, we’ll be able to look at individual buildings to see which ones use the most energy, and then see what we can do.”
First, Facilities Management will spend a year updating the most energy-demanding buildings, such as STEM-focused buildings like the Chemistry and Physics buildings, Hill said.
Afterwards, it plans to complete two more phases of meter upgrades in the following years. During the second phase, it will upgrade buildings such as dining halls and then dorms.
The upgrade will also improve dorms that use utility dashboards to keep track of resources, such as Oakland and Denton halls. Currently, the dashboard measurements are not accurate, Hill said, but the new system could greatly improve them.
“HVAC is like the campus representatives of energy consumption,” Vucci said. “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How we are using the information available to maintain a sufficient, healthy usage of energy?’”
