HVAC Updates for Changing Campus Activity
With much of the University’s faculty and staff working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Facilities Management & Operations’ (FMO) Engineering & Building Systems team is undertaking an effort to ensure energy use is commensurate to building activity. One of this team’s functions includes ensuring that building automation capabilities are operating at their greatest potential.
A building automation system is a programmed, “intelligent” control system that regulates the mechanical systems in a building such as environmental control systems, chillers, boilers, and temperature. It keeps the building’s climate within a specific range and collects data for documentation of performance. The intent is to create an intelligent building to reduce energy and maintenance costs while ensuring the comfort of the building’s occupants.
In response to the changing activity on campus, buildings with automation controls are being adjusted to reduce energy as much as possible, while ensuring minimal impact on the essential staff working on campus. For those buildings with little activity, lighting and HVAC controls will be updated, resulting in some spaces seeing temperatures as low as 60 on heating degree-days and as high as 80 on cooling degree-days. At this time, FMO is limiting this effort to common areas and offices and will not alter residential or research laboratory settings.
While the most complex buildings on campus have these advanced systems with the ability to centrally control and monitor buildings from a single workstation, many of the 370 buildings at BU do not. In order to adjust the remainder of the spaces without automated controls, FMO is dispatching its team of HVAC technicians to make manual adjustments. The hope is that this effort will help reduce BU’s environmental impact as well as utility costs.
Should you have any questions about these automation control updates, please contact Dan Quigley at dquigley@bu.edu.