The effects of the economic recession are still being felt within the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector…especially if you are a building engineer, property manager, or facility manager.
This has largely meant having to accomplish all of the same tasks (and more) with fewer resources at your disposal.
Still, your building occupants and tenants expect the same level of comfort and service from your operations. And the same holds true for your upper management.
Everyone is under pressure to become more efficient, reduce costs, and do more with less.
For many commercial building owners and operators, one of the answers to this pressing issue is to initiate energy efficiency projects.
Vendors have been quick to jump in, offering the “latest and greatest” building management systems (BMS) to help drive efficiency efforts in commercial buildings and industrial plants. These technologies have all the bells and whistles that you or anyone else can imagine, measuring nearly every aspect of a building’s operations.
Problem solved, right?
Not so fast.
For many of you who are responsible for managing and maintaining a building, these systems, with all of their benefits, have simply added another layer of complexity and responsibility to your already strained schedules and budgets.
These tools can provide tremendous value and savings to a building. But tools are meant to be used — and to be useful within the context of the environment in which they are implemented.
This is not always the case.
Here’s a great example: UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment released a study that found that a full three quarters of respondents to a survey on BMS usage rates accessed their BMS once a month or less.
From beginning to end, embarking on a sophisticated and highly-metered BMS implementation can be more than you can handle. Installation. Integration. Training. Fully understanding the system. Project identification. Project approval. Allocating (and fighting for) project resources. And on and on.
Where will you find the time?
Some of the best solutions — no matter the market or technology — have simplicity at their core. If your building staff has the experience, time, and resources to handle one of these more sophisticated BMS installations, then you will most likely see tremendous improvements in efficiency as a result.
What you may not realize, however, is that sophisticated energy analytics solutions don’t have to be hard, time-consuming, resource intensive, or expensive. Much of the data that you need to make your buildings more efficient are already available to use if you just add a little intelligence.
Surprisingly, you can get this data from your local utility.
No, this does not mean reverting back to using your monthly utility bill and a spreadsheet — or continuing to use this method if that’s what you currently do.
What it does mean is calling Gridium to learn more about how we intelligently analyze your utility data with our energy analytics solutions, turning it into valuable information that helps you do your job.
Need proof? Gridium’s efficiency reports have a 45% weekly engagement rate.
At Gridium, our goal is to make your life simple, yet still offer ongoing efficiency savings that compare to those of the most sophisticated, expensive, and more resource intensive solutions.
Our low cost, cloud-based solution has no hardware or software install, and requires no manual data entry. We offer a risk-free trial and in most cases can get you set up in just a few hours.
But don’t be fooled by our low cost or ease of use. Our energy analytics solution can handle your entire portfolio of buildings with near real-time capabilities that include deep benchmarking, spotting outliers and building drift, analyzing load data, energy bill analysis, forecasting, and more.
The bottom line: Make your life easy. Give your CFO and your tenants what they want with a set of simple tools that you will actually use to manage and save energy at your building.
