The smart way to manage your commercial buildings during lockdown
Managing energy consumption in empty or reduced occupancy buildings during COVID-19 lockdown
The COVID 19 pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges that were hard to imagine just a few months ago. With businesses instructed to comply with social distancing measures and where possible, instruct employees to work from home, there are now swathes of offices, shops, restaurants, schools, universities, hotels and many more commercial buildings closed until further notice.
For facility managers and energy managers it’s not simply a case of switching off the lights and closing the door, this new situation poses a whole range of new challenges to ensure energy consumption is monitored and regulated accordingly.
Adjusting operating parameters during lockdown
As buildings empty, building control systems will be reprogrammed to adapt to lockdown. Now, more than ever before all businesses and organisations will be looking to cut cost and wastage. For many, utility costs are one of the main expenses. But what if the control system is wrongly set and nobody is at site to notice.
A web-based energy management software provides an extra layer of sophistication that sits on top of building control systems to monitor, check, alarm and report on anomalies that are out of sync or have been overlooked.
With the new changes in place there will be impacts on energy consumption and it’s vital that energy and facilities managers can track the new settings to assess if further changes are needed. Using an advanced and intuitive energy management software (EMS) platform, such as MRI eSight, can provide a whole range of functionality and key to this is that it is accessed remotely by staff working at home.
How MRI eSight can help?
MRI eSight is web-enabled allowing you to access the platform remotely giving you up to date metrics wherever you are: there is an app for taking manual meter reads. MRI eSight dashboards display information in real-time giving you instant visibility on current usage and allowing for instant reaction in response to unexpected spikes in usage.
Once your building’s energy controls have been reconfigured, you can use the tools’ features to constantly monitor that the energy consumed reflects the reconfiguration:
- Create new alarms to alert you to any spikes in unusual energy consumption.
- Run a time of use report to indicate if equipment has been left on unintentionally.
- Communicate to your team and stakeholders by automatically emailing dynamic reports to show that energy consumption is in-line with the building’s new configuration settings.
- Run forecasting reports to predict likely spend on energy usage over the shutdown period.
- Use the league table analysis to compare the energy consumption across multiple sites.
Peace of mind with MRI eSight
During these uncertain times managing commercial energy consumption is more important than ever and ensuring that your buildings’ energy usage reflects the adjusted configurations is crucial. Having full visibility of your buildings’ energy usage is critical and deploying a robust, sophisticated and feature-heavy energy management software will help you achieve this.
If you have concerns about how to effectively manage energy consumption in your empty or reduced occupancy commercial buildings, then please get in touch with our energy experts who will be able to assist and advise you on best practice during these difficult times.
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