You have been employed by a medium-sized building services engineering firm. One of their potential clients, a property developer and management company which owns a number of commercial and multi-occupancy residential properties, is interested in the potential of Building Management Systems (BMS) to help them save money through better monitoring and control. Before hiring your firm to undertake the design and specification of BMS for their properties, they require further information and would like an example design.

LO2: Assess how a Building Management System can optimize cost and energy usage.

1. Record, on a data sheet, explain and evaluate how energy costs and usages are being measured, and what are the difference between energy cost evaluation and financial accounting, for large non-domestic buildings. (P3)

2. Select a Building Management System to optimise cost and energy usage. To further verify, you may consider a non-domestic building uses 1 million kWh of electric energy and 3,000 gallons of Number 2 fuel oil per year. The building has 45,000 square feet of conditioned space. Determine the Energy Use Index (EUI) and compare it to the average EUI of a non-domestic building (92,900 Btu/ft²/yr), and comment.

This non-domestic building pays $65,000 a year for electric energy and $3,300 a year for fuel oil. Determine the Energy Cost Index (ECI) for this building and compare it to the ECI for an average non-domestic building ($1.71/ft²/yr) and comment. (P4)

(GIVEN: each kWh contains 3,412 Btu and each gallon of Number 2 fuel oil contains

140,000 Btu.)

3. Use the BMS designed for your client, justify the selection of a BMS in achieving greater sustainability through control and monitoring. You may take into consideration that sustainable Building Management Systems have made tremendous strides in recent years toward embracing connectivity and interoperability standards. These efforts have given building owners more freedom to choose better control and monitoring mechanism for providing a more secure, safe and comfortable environment. (P5)