The age of public buildings in a town will also vary greatly as will the types of mechanical, electrical, plumbing and envelope systems and technologies.  More often than not there are less than a handful of building operators that work really hard just to keep these systems up and running, let alone have the time track system efficiencies and make adjustments to help reduce operating costs.

An energy audit of township buildings can easily identify economical measures that will reduce energy costs by 15% or more.  This is an annual operating budget reduction of $450,000, based on the above example.  If an acceptable payback period is 5 years, the budget for these upgrades is estimated at $2.25M.  Recognizing that townships may not have the capital to implement all of these measures in one fiscal year, the engineering team performing the audit can work with the community to develop a master plan that will help prioritize how and when these upgrades should be installed.  The audit and planning services should only cost a fraction of the estimated annual savings and the planning board will have a detailed study to budget operations costs for the following few years.

When the project is finished, the township will be spending fewer dollars on energy costs and have buildings that are more comfortable and healthy for the occupants.

First, while many of the light bulbs in the lamps and sconce fixtures were compact fluorescent, there were two fixtures in the bathroom with incandescent bulbs.  Maybe they were originally CF bulbs but were replaced with the incandescent-type bulb or maybe the selected fixture couldn’t fit a CF bulb.  Either way, when specifying fixtures for new construction or retrofits, a fixture type with a bulb fitting that is not compatible a less efficient incandescent bulb should be considered.  This will help maintain the efficiencies of the design throughout the life of the building.

Also, I noticed that the room conditioning unit was a vertically stacked heat pump.  It was built into a corner on the exterior wall and had one register facing the room (perpendicular to the window) and another facing across the window (parallel to the window).  This seems like a decent design to me.  The return air grille was also the access door to the unit.  I opened the door to see the specs and I was surprised to see that the heat pump was charged with R22 refrigerant.  I thought, how could this be?  Either a more expensive, lower global warming potential (GWP) unit was value engineered out of the design or someone wasn’t doing their due diligence during the construction/commissioning phase of the project.  This could have been caught during a submittal review, during construction walkthroughs by the commissioning agent or mechanical engineer or during functional testing.

Attention to detail is extremely important during all phases of a design project.  Another important responsibility of the project managers is to educate the project team on the sustainable design features of a project and why they are important to the owner and good for the environment.  These conversations should not be limited to the design team and owners/operators.  They should be carried through to the contract documents/bidding phase and reviewed with all of the bidding contractors.  This increases the potential for these sustainable design practices to be carried on to future projects an minimizes the chance to VE these items out of the design without thinking twice before it’s done.

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