Real Time Energy Management (RTEM) tech offers real savings opportunities

Compared to other U.S. cities, most New Yorkers have rela­tively little temper­a­ture control in their homes — some­thing that really struck Derek K. Jones, a Colorado native, when he first moved to Sherman Terrace. 

“One thing that I found fasci­nating was that in New York City, since every­body has steam heat and it’s either on or off, people in the dead of winter are cracking their windows because it’s so hot,” he said.

After the Sherman Terrace co-op board decided to convert their boiler to natural gas, Jones and others on the board opted to also have a bit more insight and control into the way their building regu­lates heat. They contracted with Dual Fuel, a boiler instal­la­tion and servicing company out of Mount Vernon that included in its boiler update plan an instal­la­tion of a Real Time Energy Management (RTEM) system. The tech­nology, installed with the help of a grant from NYSERDA, offers detailed insight into how a building’s energy systems are currently working, allows the building more control to set desired temper­a­tures and deter­mine how it should be working, and also trou­bleshoots issues when it isn’t working as expected. 

When the boiler is on, heat is distrib­uted from the bottom­most floor to the top. Building manage­ment sets the desired internal temper­a­ture for the building, then wire­less temper­a­ture sensors in the top floor units — the last ones to receive heat — indi­cate that the whole building has hit the desired temper­a­ture, which then auto­mat­i­cally switches off the boiler. 

Through a modem, the RTEM sends the temper­a­ture sensor data — along with an update on the boiler status — back to Dual Fuel remotely, while Jones and his fellow board members can also track the data through an app on their phones called Axxon. The sensor data is updated at five-minute inter­vals, while the status of the boiler is sent every hour. ​“The temper­a­ture sensors are like the nervous system for the boiler,” Jones said.

Although it is a more thor­ough system, it is not a perfect one. When the boiler is turned on, the RTEM reads the average heat level of the entire building, and breaks down the temper­a­tures by unit. The target number for the overall building is 72 degrees, but the RTEM isn’t able to account for sources of heat that are not connected to the boiler — including space heaters. ​“It’s kind of hard to get a real read,” Jones said. ​“People may not be getting enough heat.”

Still, the energy effi­ciency gains from the RTEM contributed to the building’s annual energy savings of 26,095 therms, or more than $53,000 in energy savings each year. Thomas Morrisson, Director of Energy Management at En-Power Group and energy consul­tant for Sherman Terrace, notes that the resi­dents have been ​“very dili­gent on the heating control.” 

The average ambient temper­a­ture of the building has fallen from 80 degrees to 72 degrees since they made the change.