WatchPost Solutions

Smart HVAC Scheduling

Even a small reduction in heating and cooling saves real energy dollars, extends equipment life, and cuts maintenance costs.

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The Problem

One Schedule, Every Zone

Modern Building Automation Systems (BAS) start and stop HVAC on a schedule automatically, a big improvement over an engineer manually flipping switches each morning. But those schedules are usually set at the building level and inherited by every zone underneath it, because managing schedules for thousands of individual zones by hand just isn't realistic.

The trouble is that zones don't actually run the same hours. One classroom might be in use 16 hours a day. The room next to it might see 2 to 3.

16 hrs

Typical daily occupancy for a heavily used zone

2–3 hrs

Typical daily occupancy for the adjacent, lightly used zone

The Fix

Schedules at the Zone Level, Not the Building Level

DSA builds and deploys a system, running on the PI System, that passes each zone's specific schedule directly to the HVAC equipment serving it. Instead of every room running on the building's schedule, each zone is activated on an as-needed basis, based on when it's actually occupied.

The automated system also accounts for warm-up and cool-down time, so every zone is properly conditioned for the full period it's occupied, no more and no less. As the system matures, it factors in each space's thermal inertia and recovery time to fine-tune those bookends even further.

Conditioning a space only when it's actually occupied is a straightforward change with an outsized payoff: lower energy bills, less equipment wear, and fewer maintenance calls.

See What's Possible with WatchPost

Schedule a demo and DSA's WatchPost team will walk through what zone-level scheduling could look like for your buildings.

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