School builds efficiency lesson plans around open-systems flexibility
The Simcoe County District School Board in central Ontario, Canada has 115 school and support buildings spread over almost 2,000 square miles. It sought to incorporate more consistency, efficiency, and energy savings into the system, but its sites use control equipment from different manufacturers, and its maintenance staff has to constantly move from building to building.
The system's management sought a front-end tool that could be centrally located, enabling individual building operators to control their own environments and support via the wide area network to each site. With budgets tightening, energy conservation and system flexibility loomed more important than ever. "We needed to empower building operators to control their environments on location," said Rick Ketteringham, maintenance supervisor of mechanical systems. It was no small task.