Portfolio
Hot Water Boiler Plant Optimization
ecoOPERA™ EMIS was configured to support retrofits projects for five Vancouver residential towers in BC’s lower mainland and to provide continuous building performance monitoring, tracking and targeting. The projects assume replacement of the existing boiler plants with high efficiency condensing boilers and installing new variable speed hot water pumps.
The ecoOPERA™ EMIS installed for this project was designed to provide:
- Collection of energy meters from over 500 measurement points with sampling rate of 1min. The EMIS provides acquisition servers that communicate with the measurement points using BACnet protocol.
- Setting the boiler plant thermal efficiency baselines and building energy use targets using: simulation data, historic (EMIS collected) data, utility bills, and weather data.
- Calculation of boiler plant thermal efficiency as the building key performance indicator.
- Alert notifications to responsible persons when: a failure status from variable speed pumps or boilers is detected, natural gas consumption by boiler plant is out of target range, and boiler plant malfunctions is detected. The alert processing criteria are evaluated hourly.
- Report actual/real-time energy consumption broken down to building hot water, building heating water, domestic hot water, and variable speed water pumps.
- Provide CUMSUM and summary reports for energy consumption broken down to the building hot water, building heating water, domestic hot water, and variable speed water pumps.
- Provide benchmark reports comparing the actual energy consumption with the designed/expected consumption.
- Buildings’ performances reporting is weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly, and can be issued on demand.
- The reports are grouped into sets dedicated to different user categories (executive, operational, and maintenance).
- The system provides secure Authentication/Authorization web-based access to the users.
As part of the project activities we performed R&D development of the Hot Water Boiler Plant Thermal Efficiency energy model and methodologies for calculating boiler efficiencies and baselining boiler plant performance. The methodology has been presented at the 19th national conference on building commissioning in Cincinnati, OH (July 22, 2011). The work has been accepted by the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program sponsored by Canada Revenue Agency.