Lowering ambient temperatures helps university save money during winter break

Lowering ambient temperatures within university buildings while students are away on holiday can help reduce the overall heating bills, and a BEMS (Building Energy Management System) is the perfect tool for this task.

This approach has been recently put into practice by Syracuse University, who decided to bring down building temperatures to save energy and money.

Syracuse University’s Department of Energy Systems and Sustainability Management reduced the temperature in campus buildings from 68 degrees to 60 degrees when students vacated their residence halls by Dec. 17. Temperatures are not lowered further as pipes could freeze, said Nathan Prior, director of ESSM.

“It is a little deceptive with what people want to see with savings because we are not shutting campus down,” Prior said. “We are still maintaining it at a minimum temperature to prevent freeze-ups in the buildings.”

The school’s energy management system is run by a control system that modulates temperatures automatically. Prior said the system is switched to an “unoccupied mode” during Winter Break from Dec. 17 through Jan. 13. When students returned to campus, temperatures were adjusted to the occupied mode, between 68 and 70 degrees.

The machines automatically fluctuate based on the outside and indoor air temperatures, something that affects the amount of energy that the school conserves, Prior said.

HeatingSave – the perfect Building Energy Management System for universities

HeatingSave has an extensive experience in the educational segment, our intelligent Building Energy Management System managing to reduce overall energy bills for numerous schools and academies by anywhere between 20 and 30%+.

HeatingSave optimizes any heating system’s overall functionality by taking into account a variety of factors, such as internal and external temperatures, occupancy, time of the year, the particular characteristics of installed boilers, etc. All of the data is used in order to determine the best heating patterns for the various heating zones within any building, using our proprietary heat-loss algorithm.

The end result is that users still get a very good level of comfort, while in the same time saving energy and money in the process.

If you’d like to find out more details on all the features HeatingSave has in store, just contact our dedicated product team, they’ll be more than happy to provide you with all the necessary information.