BMS Time Schedule Optimisation
BMS01
Proactively managing your plant time schedules through your BMS is often overlooked and can bring significant energy reductions. This ECM sets out what is required to achieve this benefit.
The likelihood of your BMS time schedules accurately reflecting your actual occupancy pattern is remote. When a building is first commissioned the focus is typically on making the building function effectively, rather than effectively and efficiently. Overtime the delta between what is optimal and what is scheduled typically grows.
To enable optimisation to be effective a number of aspects should be considered, these are detailed below.
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How is your building actually used?
Your building is likely to be occupied by various teams and departments, each with their own ways of working. The objective here is to understand their actual occupancy patterns, such that the plant and equipment supporting them can be scheduled correctly.
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How you achieve this understanding will affect the accuracy of the output you achieve, you could simply ask each team or department to provide their typical occupancy schedule and use this to work with, however this will be prone to exaggeration. thought should be given to what data may be available to evidence the actual occupancy pattern, potential exists for access card data or wireless network hub data to be used to provide insights into the actual usage pattern. This is important, if you consider a 9 hour working day each half an hour would represent 5% of the day, getting occupancy patterns accurate can make a significant difference. When collecting occupancy data, regardless of whether this is done through enquiry or data, evaluate each day separately. It has always been the case that occupancy patterns vary through the week, with Mondays and Fridays typically having lighter occupancy and less working late than on the days in the middle of the week The most accurate understanding of occupancy patterns is likely to be derived from combining the information received from enquiries with the occupants with data received from other sources and working through any mismatches that exist.
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What plant serves which areas?
Every building is different with designs of the buildings services varying significantly from one building to another. To allow the time schedule optimisation to occur it is necessary to develop a thorough understanding of which plant and equipment supports which area. It would be beneficial to collate this data into a schedule, which brings together the equipment name, power rating, areas which it supports, its time schedule for each day of the week and any related temperature or pressure set points. Not all of this information is required for this ECM however it would be a great enabler for other ECM's you should implement. A sample schedule is available for download at the end of this ECM.
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Applying your changes
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Retaining the benefit
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Note
We have used the term BMS generically to mean any building control system which schedules and controls plant and equipment. In many facilities the system which controls your lighting, a lighting control system, will be referred to separately, as a distinct system to the BMS and is often maintained by a different specialist vendor. Exactly the same time scheduling practices apply to lighting control systems , however you may need to be specific in your request to your maintenance teams to ensure that all relevant systems are addressed and not just 'the BMS'.