Transforming the Practices of Building Operation and Maintenance Professionals: A Washington State Pilot Program

Srinivas Katipamula and Michael R. Brambley, Battelle, Pacific Northwest Division

Keywords

Abstract

Retro-commissioning studies place the potential energy savings from improved operation and maintenance (O&M) of commercial buildings between 5% and 30%. A pilot program has been initiated in the state of Washington focused on capturing a significant portion of this potential through transformation of building O&M professionals' practices. The program consists of three parts: 1) re-tuning large commercial buildings, 2) installation of wireless smart monitoring and diagnostic systems (SMDS) on packaged heating, ventilation and airconditioning (HVAC) units for small commercial buildings to guide servicing of these units, and 3) increasing the energy focus of O&M subject matter for education of both current practitioners and new students considering or pursuing careers in this field. The 3-year program began in October 2006, with most of the first year devoted to initiating the large-building effort. Mid-year (2007), the small-building HVAC effort was started; the educational curricula effort began in 2008.

This paper describes the program and its components, and provides interim results. Over 8 million square feet of building space is directly involved in the re-tuning effort and much more should be impacted following completion of the project. The paper also characterizes the participating organizations and buildings and provides information on the re-tuning process, information on the SMDS, descriptions of the methodologies used to measure impacts, impressions of participants, and a discussion of barriers encountered in implementation.