The Impact of Manual Overrides on Efficiency
Manual overrides are often necessary short-term fixes. But forgotten, they're also long-term anchors on your building efficiency.
Data analysis of four campus buildings before and after a major power outage. Forgotten manual overrides were revealed when operations came back online at both lower tonnage and kW due to the return to system-optimized settings.
The Impact of Manual Overrides on System Efficiency
THE STORY
A client with a large campus experienced a massive power outage last month. When they started back up, they asked us to analyze the outage’s impact. Here's what we found.
The power outage forced a complete reset of all systems (as outages do). The reset exorcised all the ghosts of manual overrides past and the entire system went back to its optimized settings. (We had helped with optimizing the system a few years ago)
What was the effect of this system reset on tonnage and energy consumption?
The good news from the outages is that we can put numbers to what all those forgotten overrides cost. Even normalized for different temperatures (both outside air temp [OAT] and outside air wet bulb temp [OAWBT]):
- Chiller tonnage went down 6%.
- Building consumption went down 8%–25% (depending on bldg).
MORAL OF THE STORY
A chiller plant is more than the sum of its parts. Left too long, manual overrides create sticky points that bog down operations. Clearing overrides lets everything flow freely and lets you enjoy long-term, sustained savings.
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