Reducing operating costs and energy use for educational facilities

Numerous primary, secondary and higher education institutions look to ESI to help them achieve energy savings and reduce operating costs through a variety of measures. At the same time, we ensure that the unique needs of educational facilities are not compromised.

Whether you’re operating a higher education institution with multiple campus facilities or a school district with many facilities spread across a municipality, a common challenge is the variety of systems within the various buildings. This occurs because of the commonly used open procurement process, which generally results in different manufacturers’ systems and technology, as well as a variety of communication protocols. This presents significant challenges to today’s ever-shrinking operating budgets.

While there’s the substantially higher, cost to maintain a variety of systems, the more significant cost relates to the knowledge of the staff that maintains it. With a variety of systems, the ability to shift or reallocate personnel to accommodate vacations, etc., becomes difficult, at best. Plus, the cost to cross-train on multiple systems is prohibitive. Perhaps the most negative impact stems from the fact that without a properly trained staff to support this variety of systems, energy efficiency is almost impossible to achieve. Systems become nothing more than alarm generators, rather than tools to operate buildings in the most efficient manner.

ESI solves these problems by incorporating a software framework that provides your staff with a common set of tools that eliminate the need to deal with each individual system interface, such as scheduling, alarms and adjustments. This significantly reduces training requirements. Even more importantly, it enables your operators to truly manage the buildings proactively, rather than reactively. And that creates measurable performance and cost improvements.

Our team has vast experience in bringing alternative and renewable energy sources into school facilities. As an example, we provided controls and system integration for a Wisconsin school district, that implemented the state’s largest geothermal retro-fit project ever.

We also provide innovative energy and operating dashboards and kiosks, which help your educational facility build an awareness of efficiency and sustainability efforts among stakeholders; students, staff and the public. Using these information sharing techniques, we can help create student competitions so that everyone is actively involved in achieving higher levels of efficiency and sustainability.

Retro-commissioning is an important measure for educational facilities.  As facilities age, it becomes important to assure that equipment is operating at peak efficiency and avoid premature equipment failure.  We follow up the retro commissioning activities with automated continuous commissioning applications that greatly increase the life span of systems and assets and identify any fault that occurs in the system before it becomes critical and causes excessive energy consumption or system failure.  This keeps your retro-commissioned facility in peak operating condition. 

In one school alone, the savings generated by retro-commissioning the mechanical and controls systems resulted in monthly savings of over $7,000.

ESI also works with you to provide available utility and tax incentives to help offset the cost of energy saving improvements.

ESI understands that nothing is more important than the safety of your students, faculty and staff.  We offer a wide array of security solutions for single building, campus and district wide applications. Our solutions include access control, video surveillance, fire, mass notification and comprehensive risk assessments to ensure the protection of life and property. We provide services ranging from planning, design and specification development, to complete turn-key solutions and on-going support programs that include UL-listed alarm monitoring capabilities as well as remote access system management.