HVAC: New Equipment Boosts Energy Efficiency
Part 1: Hospital's Aging Core Poses Maintenance, Engineering Challenges
Part 2: Building-Automation System Streamlines Preventive Maintenance
Part 3: Energy-Efficient Chillers, Air-Handling Units Demand More Maintenance
Part 4: Organization Closes Old Hospital, Opens New Facility Same Day
Building-Automation System Streamlines Preventive Maintenance
By Chris Matt, Managing Editor - Print & E-Media - June 2010 - Building Automation
Modern, energy-saving technology was a welcome sight for technicians who had been working with outdated, underperforming equipment in the old hospital. Instead of having to handle frequent emergency repair calls and make regular visits to operating suites and nursing stations for too-hot and too-cold complaints, technicians now focus on fine-tuning HVAC equipment and performing the necessary preventive maintenance (PM).
"There's something new to learn every day here," Skeens says. "We're still breaking in the building, but everyone has a sense of where everything is laid out and how it works. It seems to be less effort in (the technicians') daily routines. They can concentrate on PMs because they don't have as many daily calls."
The hospital's building-automation system (BAS) has played a key role in managing hot-cold calls more efficiently, analyzing energy performance, and monitoring the indoor air quality (IAQ) of different spaces within the hospital.
"We have less heat and air problems at this facility than we did at the old place," Holzkamper says. "With the energy-management system we have, we can spend five minutes on the computer and come out knowing what it's going to take to fix something. It makes the end user much happier when they call us and get something fixed in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days."
