Energy Conservation Solutions for Modern Buildings
Here's an unverified fact: nobody's ever opened an electric bill with enthusiasm.
Now for a verified fact: keeping the lights on and the building heated is a massive expense that costs upwards of $20,000 a month depending on the size of the building.
Electricity costs are burdensome. However, commercial building owners often aren't aware that there are easy ways to cut energy costs with ease. For example, a government-issued report discovered that commercial buildings waste an average of 30% of the energy costs they pay for. This amounts to thousands of wasted dollars annually.
How does one eliminate excessive energy waste? Keep reading. You'll find a guide to the best energy conservation solutions available to you right now.
Overview of Energy Conservation in Modern Buildings
Energy consumption is now a federal concern, which carries many implications. For one, it means lowering energy usage isn't just a matter of cost, it's one of environmental impact. Now, there are legal mandates for creating sustainable buildings and performance policies, which will eventually require building managers and owners to monitor, analyze, and address energy consumption.
While these new laws might seem like an inconvenience, they actually can help lower overhead costs long term. The catch is that you need the right technology.
Maybe you don't know where to go. Thankfully, many helpful energy-efficient solutions and strategies exist to help implement and immediately begin lowering excessive energy bills.
Understanding IoT-Based Energy Conservation
If the walls of your building could talk, they would likely blab about how you're wasting electricity. With IoT solutions, there are no more ifs. It's possible to give your building a voice.
At its core, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions connect appliances, utilities, and building systems to Internet-powered sensors. These sensors feed information to building managers who can use their mobile devices as remote controls to monitor to analyze real-time data about energy and water consumption.
These solutions deliver many benefits of energy conservation, which include:
Automating key appliances, lighting, HVACs, and utility systems
Track energy usage to pinpoint areas of waste
Analyze equipment to identify key repairs and maintenance needs
Form cohesive strategies across all building applications to streamline cost-reducing insights
IoT solutions aren't some futuristic hope, like hoverboards. They're here now, and ready to use.
For example, Kansas State University recently adopted Attune's custom IoT solution to create a sustainable smart campus. These fine-tuned sensors allowed campus managers to rig the campus to visualize and track energy and water usage across departments, dorms, classrooms, and offices.
Eventually, through collaborative efforts with staff, faculty, and the student body, KSU fashioned a top-down approach to spread awareness of the need for energy efficient conservation. It started with IoT and resulted in a campus-wide movement to dramatically reduce energy usage and increase sustainability.
Key IoT-Based Energy Conservation Solutions
There's been a lot of lofty talk up to this point. Now, it's time to get into specifics. What are these IoT solutions, and how do they provide value?
Energy monitoring solutions serve many roles, given their versatile nature. However, here's a snapshot of some main uses that many building managers use to capture immediate energy savings.
Smart Lighting Systems
Did you know that about 11% of residential energy bills are spent on lights alone? With IoT, you can reduce this number significantly.
Connecting your building's lights to smart light systems ensures they're only shining when needed. Sensors provide the capability to automate controls, meaning they'll switch off or dim as soon as no human presence is detected within a room. On top of this, managers can control lighting remotely, meaning no light is left on overnight.
Intelligent HVAC Controls
Commercial buildings allot about 39% of their electric costs to HVAC. It's often the most expensive appliance by far, but simple IoT sensors can reduce the cost significantly.
To start, IoT can monitor usage and incorporate it with machine learning. Over time, the platform can estimate when to raise and lower temperatures, optimizing the HVAC to run as little as possible.
Remote monitoring also allows managers to adjust settings anytime, anywhere. Say someone sets the AC low and accidentally forgets to turn it off before leaving. Those with control access can see it from their phone and turn the AC off or raise the temperature.
Lastly, IoT allows for zone monitoring, meaning you can adjust heating and cooling systems in specific areas of a building. So, if there's more natural light or more insulation on one floor you can set the system up to use less heating power during the day.
Energy Management Platforms
Achieving sustainability requires data-driven knowledge. In other words, proof that your efforts produce real results. IoT solutions are perfect becaus they capture and crunch data to illustrate energy-saving efforts.
Whether it's tracking the cost savings of solar panels as a renewable energy source or identifying which kitchen appliances waste the most energy, a simple, powerful energy management platform is needed to inform and provide proof that prompts you to make mission-critical decisions.
Selecting the Right IoT Solutions
Whether you're overseeing the operation of constructing energy-efficient buildings of the future or retrofitting some pre-war fixer-upper with new sustainability tools, IoT smart sensors are pivotal to locking in immediate change.
However, when choosing the best energy conservation solution you need to ask the right questions:
Does this IoT solution give me control over every section and appliance in the building?
How powerful is the software, and does it provide accurate real-time data?
How helpful is the platform in visualizing and interpreting collected data?
If you want a solution that checks off all the boxes, look no further than Attune's unified smart-building platform. We've developed one of the most intuitive, easy-to-integrate platforms out there, allowing building owners to customize energy consumption insights to bring down utility costs from the get-go.
Don't take our word for it. See the power of Attune for yourself and schedule a free demo today.
