Daylight Savings Time

http://www.buildings.com/articles/detail.aspx?contentID=3580

Remember that Daylight Savings Time is this weekend. March 9th, 2008 to be specific!

For those of you with regular setback thermostats you may want to pay special attention to this as you will either need to move the internal clocks ahead by an hour in all locations that observe DST or just leave it go for another 3 weeks.

This is assuming they are even set right in the first place. The whole idea behind adding 4 additional weeks to DST is to conserve Daylight. With longer periods of daylight available each evening, less artificial light will be used. In theory.

I'm going to talk for a bit about the non-critical things that could be addressed but aren't. Things like parking lot lights, signage, hvac schedules, etc.... The DST change just emphasizes how these non-critical, but simple to address issues are either ignored or forgotten about.

One of my hobbies is when out with my wife to check out a buildings thermostats.

I can not tell you the last time we were out that I did not see at least one thermostat that didn't have its time set incorrectly. And I'm not even just talking about being off by an hour, I'm talking about being off by an hour and a half or an hour and 45 min. An hour I can see, that is just easy to miss DST, but an hour and a half now that is just lazy on someone's part or ignorance on how the thermostat works.

Now we are not talking about rocket science here, we are talking about a simple timeclock for a thermostat. What's the big deal if a thermostat is off with its time? Well, it will either start earlier and end earlier than it should or it will start later and end later than it should. Either way it is conditioning the space when no-one is there.......ie. it is wasting energy. But hey, c'mon, who cares about paying a little extra for an hour of energy when it isn't needed? Every day? Multiply that times the number of stats per enterprise that aren't set right or even working? But who cares about the simple easy to fix stuff that could save a company thousands or millions of dollars per year?

Since Green means saving energy I want to emphasize the fact that there are many building controls on the market today that connect to the internet and don't rely on a pre-programmed chip to control the internal clock. Many controls will adjust the time of a building's controls at least once a day if not more.

This is just one very simple & cost effective benefit of today's building controls, with out even getting into any curtailment routines or other control strategies, simply by ensuring that a stat is working and it's clock is set correctly you can improve the energy efficiency of your enterprise.