Sustainability at Lake Superior College

Creating an Energy Efficient Operations Manual at LSC

A summer update from the MN GreenCorps desk at Lake Superior College…

In these final months of the GreenCorps service year we are undertaking one last major energy savings project at Lake Superior College.  This project is the creation of an Energy Efficient Operations Manual (EEOM).  This is an admittedly long and potentially confusing name but it aims to make things a lot simpler and more efficient in the future.  The EEOM is one of several services available to LSC through the B3 portal.  LSC has already utilized the benchmarking service which allows for us to track and measure past energy use on campus.  The EEOM falls under the operations site which looks at the day to day energy use of buildings.

For LSC it looks like the best use of the EEOM is to optimize the air handling units on campus.  These are the devices that supply hot or cold air depending on the season to all areas of the campus.  These units are controlled by a building automation system called Metasys which allows maintenance to schedule the operation of each individual unit.  The EEOM takes this scheduling feature and gathers feedback from building occupants to develop a more efficient schedule for each air handling unit.  There is also a feature built in to the EEOM that requires these schedules to be renegotiated on a regular basis in the future as schedules and building occupants change.  This ensures that building will be operating efficiently today and into the future as well.

Future Possibilities:

Looking to the future LSC can also use the EEOM to optimize lighting controlled by the Metasys system as well as water heaters.  LSC has also reviewed opportunities to supplement its existing systems with various software tools that provide additional control over heating and cooling on campus.  Right now a solution like these seems like more than LSC needs. However depending on the results once the EEOM is implemented a highly customizable and controllable system may make sense.

Other Updates:

Since the last blog post there are some other updates on other GreenCorps projects.  There is now a follow up survey available for the Green Office Challenge.  This is a quick survey designed to gauge the changes participants have made as a result of your participation in the challenge as well as an additional opportunity to give any feedback they may have.  The Sustainability Council still has 3 compost bins available for interested offices!  These bins have a built in filter to contain any odors associated with food scrap collection.  Contact christopher.whaley@lsc.edu if you are interested.