Case study - School saves money by monitoring energy

2012-01-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

This was a Secondary school with 6th form with around 1200 students. The objective was to educate staff and pupils on the cost of energy used and influence behavior in order to save energy.

Step 1: Install an energy monitor.

The PowerEYE200 was chosen to have access to instantaneous energy usage. The results were then uploaded to a website using the schools broadband connection.

Key personnel in the school were provided with access to a dashboard showing energy consumption.

Step 2: Identify energy usage.

Over a period of a number of week energy usage in the two blocks was monitored. Again, the area to concentrate on is the times when the building was empty ie the evenings and the weekend. Two areas were identified for investigation initially.

One was the high energy usage from about 2 in the morning of the order of 25 kW. This was from a number of night storage heaters. The other was identified as monitors being left in standby. Although each monitor uses around 20W, when there are some 300 monitors the total power consumption is around 6 kW.

Step 3: Convert this into pounds and pence.

The cost of running the storage heaters was around £4000 a year. The cost of monitors in standby, instead of being off was £3500 a year.

Step 4: Implement corrective actions.

Adjust the timers on the night storage heaters to make sure that they did not operate at the weekends. Instruct staff on correct end of day procedure.

Fit standby saver sockets on all PCs so that monitors and other peripherals switched off when PCs shut down automatically at the end of the day. Reprogram PC shut down time to earlier in the day.

Step 5: Monitor improvements on dashboard over a number of weeks.