Graph credit: www.marketwatch.com One of my mantras this year at kW has been to try to minimize uncertainty. Uncertainty is bad for business – it stalls decisions, makes your colleagues nervous, anxious and stressed, and generally sows the seeds for trouble. Well best laid plans… between...
Trust, but verify. Seems reasonable, but sometimes in commissioning I think ‘always verify’ is a better phrase. Investigation is key in retro-commissioning We were completing a retro-commissioning project on community college building in Southern California and noticed something off in the trend data. The economizer on two...
If you reside outside the world of energy efficiency, you might not be familiar with an energy audit. Perhaps you just want to reduce operating expenses by lowering your utility bills? Maybe you need to meet corporate sustainability goals? An energy audit can be the...
The end of this year brought about an unexpected and tragic loss to our kW team, when our friend and college David Struck passed away suddenly. Here at kW, it’s like working with family, not to sound cliched, but it’s true. So, in November when...
You can evaluate energy performance and target energy saving projects using graphics like in the case of one of our portfolio clients where we evaluated lighting control system performance looking at lighting power density (LPD) and energy use intensity (EUI). Data visualization is one of...
A big focus for maintenance staff is minimizing complaints to relieve occupant discomfort. People who are consistently too hot or too cold make it known and we’ve seen many buildings where the entire building operation was off kilter due to the needs of a few,...
Sole sourcing for an HVAC control system is an unquestioned norm but has not been widely accepted in the lighting control system world. There are many reasons why sole sourcing benefits you. A single lighting control system can not only be networked, but it also...
Thank you @Doug Scott (VaCom Technologies) for this interesting question: Why is it that companies are not, themselves, putting a price on carbon? If we have reason to think that companies’ fortunes will rise and fall in response to sound planning, why wait for the government?...
Energy modeling or building simulation is a powerful tool for predicting or analyzing building energy use. We use EnergyPlus and OpenStudio frequently when developing whole building energy models. After years using these tools in a consulting environment and sharing that knowledge on the Building Energy...
We use regression analysis frequently in our energy engineering analysis, but results can be less than ideal for many cases. Now with big data and the current technology of faster computing, we can use a comprehensive understanding of statistics, hypothesis testing, and principles of inference...