I started off the day in an excellent meeting with Mr. Miller. We discussed the age of different parts of the building. Although under one roof, (besides Dayal and the Hawks Nest) Maumee Valley's main campus was built in nine different sections over a span of 80 years. That information will be essential in creating an accurate online portfolio for the school. It will also be useful for me and others who analyze the building to ensure that the older and less-efficient parts of the building receive the most attention. Other building details which we discussed and have been added to MV's Energy Star Portfolio are: percent floor occupancy, gross floor area, and irrigated area.
I learned today from Mr. Miller about the complexity of Maumee Valley's heating and cooling systems. Because the building as a whole was constructed in segments, our central air and heating systems are separate, varied, and largely independent from each other. With each addition to the Maumee Valley campus came a different way to condition the new rooms. The result is a patchwork of different, small systems to keep the building comfortable. From boiler loops to rooftop commercial air systems, MV seems to use one of every climate control system on the market. My deduction from this discovery is that the school is using much more energy than needed running so many independent systems and compensating for the ways in which each system obstructs the climates of neighboring rooms. Because so many systems are operating and not "talking" with each other, it is likely that to some degree, the systems fight each other to maintain the correct temperature in their room and in doing so alter the established climate of adjacent rooms. The decentralized nature of the systems, therefore, may be a large energy sink which could be averted with large investiture.
On Monday, I plan to talk to Mr. Ely (as I didn't get a chance to do so today) and to further complete the Energy Star Portfolio. I need to follow up with a couple people regarding the legality of me getting up on the roof to check out our rooftop climate systems from above. I also plan to work out some details surrounding my trip to a conference on sustainability later this year.
