Summary and Early Findings from a Second Generation Information Monitoring and Diagnostic System

Private sector commercial office buildings are challenging environments for energy efficiency projects. This challenge is related to the complexity of business environments that involve ownership, operation, and tenant relationships. This research project was developed to examine the environment for building operations and identify causes of inefficient use of energy related to technical and organizational issues. This paper discusses a second-generation Information Monitoring and Diagnostic System (IMDS) installed at a leased office building in Sacramento, California. The underlying principle of this project is that high quality building performance data can help show where energy is being used and how buildings systems actually perform. Such data are an important first step toward improving building energy efficiency. This project has demonstrated that the IMDS is valuable to the building operators at the Sacramento site. The building operators not only accept the technology, but it has become the core of their day-to-day building control concepts. One objective of this project was to evaluate the costs and benefits of the IMDS. The system cost about $0.70 per square foot, which includes the design, hardware, software, and installation, which is about 30% less than the previous IMDS in San Francisco. A number of operational problems have been identified with the IMDS.