City Of Tea Tree Gully

Catching out the Building Management System

The Challenge

Most Councils rely on their Building Management Systems (BMS) to work as they should. But as the City of Tea Tree Gully discovered, that’s not always the case.

When the Council’s dedicated Azility Service Manager conducted their regular analysis of data using the platform’s innovative Meter Minder module, they were able to pinpoint an anomaly: that the Civic Centre was running at full power on a public holiday when the building was not in use. The Service Manager was straight on the phone to Council to let the right people know.

Further investigation revealed that the BMS – which was thought to be programmed to switch the Civic Centre off on public holidays – was not doing so. This was then corrected immediately, ready to save Council energy and money when the next public holiday hit.

Azility then tracked and calculated the savings headed Tea Tree Gully’s way as a
result.

The Azility Difference

Azility tracks your energy around the clock, but that’s just one part of a much bigger picture. Your Service Manager regularly reviews your interval data as part of our Quarterly Performance Review, hunting for performance issues. We do our homework so you don’t have to, shining a light on high after-hours consumption, spikes in demand, poor power factor, zero renewable generation and more. Then we let you know right away so you can change it up and make instant savings.

Key take-aways

Meter Minder is delivering savings and peace of mind for our customers through immediate verification of energy and water savings measures, including behavioural, maintenance and capital works.

According City of Tea Tree Gully’s John Herd, “Meter Minder is proving an excellent way to gauge the dollar impact of changes in energy use.”

Here’s what else Council learned from the experience:

• BMS’s cannot necessarily be relied upon without regular checking of
  performance
• always double-check that your BMS is programmed to take the correct
  holidays
• monitoring Interval data of key sites is the best way to gauge energy use,
  the effect of energy saving initiatives and the dollar impact,
• Azility knows how to find dollar savings in energy data, and
• nothing beats the independent eagle eye of an Azility Service Manager!