The majority of office buildings are not capable of executing the performance they were designed for in the first place. We aren’t changing the design here; it’s just that the break between the expected performance and what is actually happening is gradually becoming larger and larger due to errors in sensors, deposits forming, and not taking proper care of the building. We don’t need to make massive changes in order to close that gap. It’s necessary to be careful in how you control the current situation.
Thermal Comfort and Efficiency Aren’t Fighting Each Other
The most basic error in building management is to consider heating and cooling as conflicting requirements. Occupants too warm? Lower the heating. Bill too high? Reduce the cooling. This cycle is what wastes energy and doesn’t improve comfort.
The smarter approach is deadband control. Specify that your heating is off at temperatures above 22°C and that your cooling is off at temperatures below 18°C. Neither system will be fighting the other. Occupants in a suitably adjusted building will be comfortable. You’ll save energy on a building that isn’t trying to run both systems at the same time.
It doesn’t have to cost a penny to start saving energy.
Sensors Drift, and Small Errors Cost Real Money
A thermostat being off by 1°C might not be a major problem. However, that one-degree deviation caused energy costs to increase by 5% to 10% and complaints from staff members who insist they’re too hot or too cold even though there are no evident reasons feeling that way.
Sensor calibration seems to be one of the items on a building’s maintenance schedule that gets overlooked the most. Thermostats, CO2 sensors, humidity probes – they all drift. It costs almost nothing to check calibration, other than the insane amount of energy you’ve wasted on the thermostat being off by two degrees for the past three years.
With demand-controlled ventilation, sensors are again the answer. If you’re relying on a timer to bring in fresh air, CO2 sensors are far more effective at measuring actual room occupancy and adjusting ventilation accordingly. An empty boardroom doesn’t need the same rate of air exchange as one with thirty people in it. The system reacts to what’s happening, not what the schedule says is happening.
Heating Infrastructure Sets The Baseline For Everything Else
Cooling systems and ventilation get most of the attention in energy conversations, but heating infrastructure – particularly hydronic systems – is often where efficiency quietly deteriorates.
Hydronic heating relies on circulated water at precise temperatures and pressures. When boilers develop scale buildup, even minor fouling forces the system to work harder to achieve the same heat output. A boiler running at degraded efficiency doesn’t just cost more to operate – it creates uneven heat distribution that occupants notice before the energy bill reflects the problem.
Scheduling Boiler Preventative Maintenance Canberra (or similar services elsewhere) through the warmer months means that when heating demand peaks, the system is already operating at full thermal efficiency rather than being pushed hard in a degraded state. Commercial heating plant that hasn’t been serviced in 12 to 18 months can require up to 20% more energy input to produce the same output as a well-maintained system.
That’s not a theoretical figure – it’s the kind of efficiency loss that shows up gradually enough that no single month’s bill triggers an investigation.
Move From Reactive To Proactive On Heavy Plant
The fix-it-when-it-breaks approach costs more than most facility managers realize. Emergency call-out rates, unplanned downtime, occupant disruption, and the energy waste in the period leading up to failure all accumulate – often in amounts greater than the cost of more regular maintenance would have been.
According to the Department of Energy, commercial buildings with proactive maintenance programs use around 5% to 20% less energy with no significant capital investments. That’s a wide range, spanning the gamut of how neglected a building is before an improved maintenance program is put in place. Most long-time-reactive-buildings fall in the 15% to 20% improvement category.
Predictive maintenance, which uses operational data and diagnostics to predict when a component will fail, and triggers a maintenance event to keep it from failing, often shows an additional five to ten points of efficiency gain over scheduled maintenance. For buildings with building automation systems in place, this operational data often is being collected – the question is whether someone is analyzing it.
Make Energy Use Visible To The People Inside The Building
Occupants play a significant role in energy decisions – whether that’s leaving the window open because the heating’s on, or plugging in the personal space heater because the desk fan’s in the way. More effective than aiming to police those decisions is making the results of them open and transparent.
Digital dashboards displaying real-time or daily energy use give staff a direct line between their habits and the building’s performance. It’s not about blame. It’s about making the connection visible. Buildings that have introduced this kind of occupant-facing feedback consistently see a reduction in behavioral energy waste without requiring policy enforcement.
The efficiency gap closes from both directions – better-maintained systems from the plant room up, and more informed occupants from the office floor down. Neither side of that equation requires significant spending. Both require consistent attention.
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