With the huge focus across industries on saving energy, it's sometimes easy to miss the simple solutions.

Uber Control has been working with a major client to reduce energy across an estate of buildings.  The measures underway have included renewing inefficient equipment, introducing local energy generating plant and utilising renewable supplies.  These are guaranteed energy, carbon and cost saving schemes turning major investment into long lasting outcomes.  Whilst these energy conservation measures are definitely impacting, we have had a surprising result from a much simpler scheme.

The first step was to identify current building area occupancy times.  We worked closely with each building manager to identify individual department areas and record the times in which these were in use.

We then identified the ventilation plant serving each of the department areas.  Surveying the plant, we recorded the motor load details for each fan.

Then we turned to the BMS.  We checked the programmed schedule times for each of the supplying ventilation plants.  It was possibly unsurprising that we found a large discrepancy between the required plant running times and the programmed time schedules.

Once we had verified and agreed the new schedule times, one of our BMS engineers set to correcting the schedules.  Spending a couple days on site, this was a relatively inexpensive and non intrusive process.

So, after completing the survey and corrective measures, the client has a projected reduction for overall fan running times of a staggering 68,822 hours per year across the estate.  Using the collated plant survey data, the approximate electrical energy saving (allowing for estimated VSD reductions) is an impressive 350,000 kWh per year.  Due to the complexity of calculations, we have not estimated the heating/cooling energy savings, but these are also understood to be significant.

This was achieved with no impact on the services delivered by the client, no down time in implementation and by just exercising common sense and good practices.  With our help our client can enjoy the comfort of knowing that they have made impressive cost savings, a huge reduction in energy consumption and are contributing to less carbon emissions.

If you would like to find out more, or would like to find out if we can help your organisation achieve similar results, get in touch today by emailing enquiries@ubercontrol.co.uk.  We very much look forward to working with you to make a real impact.