Resolving Fan Operational Inefficiencies for an International Corporate Headquarters

The international headquarters for a banking and financial services institution had already initiated large-scale equipment retrofitting as apart of implementing sustainability measures. Collaboration with CopperTree Analytics began as an additional measure for discovering operational inefficiencies and proposing further sustainability action for the client. With the client’s campus of buildings making up over 1M sq.ft. of conditioned space, building data analytics would prove to be essential for efficient operational monitoring.

Yearly Savings

$ 0

Yearly kWh Reduced

Tons of avoided yearly CO2e emissions

CopperTree was engaged to work with an international banking and financial services institution to analyze both office and customer services spaces at their international headquarters.

This building campus had an established Building Automation System (BAS) but had never been able to optimize the operation of equipment using analytics. Therefore, CopperTree’s goal was to implement Kaizen FDD software to identify and subsequently optimize operational shortcomings.

Upon implementing the building into Kaizen, insights were generated for both supply and return fans in the buildings air handling units. These insights related to the fans operating consistently at speeds of 100% and operating outside of scheduled hours, leading to potential annual costs of over US$15,000.

Upon further investigation, we found the return and supply fans to have been put into “manual-mode” to constantly operate at top speeds. In this situation, the challenge was to address the operational sequencing of each type of fan to achieve cost savings and efficient operation.

For the supply fans, the result was to develop operational sequencing which would allow the use of a lower speed on the available VFD drives, therefore saving a substantial amount of energy. However, the return fans did not operate on a VFD drive. Despite this, we were still able to implement improved operational sequencing which would ensure the return fans would operate within scheduled hours, therefore positively contributing to the client’s sustainability initiatives.