Thermally comfortable children and staff at the Moss Street Children's Center.

The intent of the designers of the Moss Street Children’s Center was to create a highly energy efficient and thermally comfortable environment for its occupants. Despite their best efforts, however, the systems in place were not operating at optimum efficiency. (It should be noted that even at 57% wheel efficiency, the HRU would still be saving energy by reducing the heat load in the building during the winter.) In order to save the most energy, the system needs to be properly maintained. The first item under “Maintenance and Troubleshooting” in the operation manual for the HRU unit is “inspect filter conditions quarterly and replace with equivalent panel filters.” Maintenance of any building system is of course completely voluntary and dependent on the resources of the building staff. The attempt by the designers to install a control system that would prompt maintenance had apparently failed or is not engaged.

The most important lesson gained from this study is that design intent does not equal performance. Vigilance and maintenance are required to ensure that complex systems function as they should. It is admirable that the University has adopted its Sustainable Development Plan. However, in order to succeed, it must also be able to dedicate the resources to both understand and effectively use these innovative systems.

Building commissioning is critical to successful operations. This is even more crucial when implementing highly energy efficient and innovative mechanical packages.

Through your project and our investigations, we discovered two flaws that could have prevented the issues Dennis (Reynolds) encountered; the monitoring points were not set up to alarm and the sensors were installed backwards. With these items addressed, future lowered efficiency will result in notification that there is a problem of some type. (Could be filters, motors, drive belts, plugged OA screen, you name it.)

I'd also like to suggest magnehelic gages be installed on air handlers in addition to electronic monitoring; these "in your face" low tech watchdogs would have resulted in maintenance being completed many months sooner. In this case, I'd have mounted them high on the wall in the area below the mechanical equipment so any staffer could have noticed a high reading and reported it to Dennis.

Ah, hindsight, huh?

We also heard from Moss Street Children's Center director Dennis Reynolds who stated that he would be following up with facilities services to assist in monitoring the unit more closely.