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At Indiana University, Cross-Department Acceptance of FDD Started with Building Health, Not Energy Savings
Asher Ensmenger, an energy engineer at Indiana University, and his team were given roughly $450,000 to reduce the campus's energy use. They decided to allocate part of the budget to testing whether fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) could earn its place at an institution like theirs, starting with two large campus buildings.
The project followed a traditional FDD setup, with three groups doing the work: a technology platform, BuildingLogiX, providing the FDD software; a service provider, HEAPY, acting as the monitoring-based commissioning agent; and an internal energy engineer representing the owner. Across the two buildings, the platform monitored air handlers, chilled-water plants, and terminal units in labs, offices, and classrooms. Every month, HEAPY reviewed the faults it flagged and brought a resolution plan back to the university team.
Ensmenger was candid about the difficulty of getting buy-in from the various departments inside an institution. A university does not exist to save energy, or even money. It exists to give students, faculty, and researchers a comfortable, safe place to work, and researchers will win any fight between their conditions and someone's efficiency project. Pitching FDD on kilowatt-hours alone didn't land with the facilities operations, IT, and building automation groups he needed on his side. Each protects its own territory and looks for cross-departmental solutions that make their jobs easier, not more difficult.
So, Ensmenger framed the pilot as a way to "fix problems that are interfering with operations". Broken control sequences, valves leaking through, and quiet failures prevent a building from optimizing energy efficiency. Described that way, FDD reads as building health, and the departments came along.
By the time Ensmenger presented at NexusCon, the team had realized about a third of the roughly $185,000 it had identified, and it plans to work through the rest and extend the pilot to more buildings on campus.
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Asher Ensmenger, an energy engineer at Indiana University, and his team were given roughly $450,000 to reduce the campus's energy use. They decided to allocate part of the budget to testing whether fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) could earn its place at an institution like theirs, starting with two large campus buildings.
The project followed a traditional FDD setup, with three groups doing the work: a technology platform, BuildingLogiX, providing the FDD software; a service provider, HEAPY, acting as the monitoring-based commissioning agent; and an internal energy engineer representing the owner. Across the two buildings, the platform monitored air handlers, chilled-water plants, and terminal units in labs, offices, and classrooms. Every month, HEAPY reviewed the faults it flagged and brought a resolution plan back to the university team.
Ensmenger was candid about the difficulty of getting buy-in from the various departments inside an institution. A university does not exist to save energy, or even money. It exists to give students, faculty, and researchers a comfortable, safe place to work, and researchers will win any fight between their conditions and someone's efficiency project. Pitching FDD on kilowatt-hours alone didn't land with the facilities operations, IT, and building automation groups he needed on his side. Each protects its own territory and looks for cross-departmental solutions that make their jobs easier, not more difficult.
So, Ensmenger framed the pilot as a way to "fix problems that are interfering with operations". Broken control sequences, valves leaking through, and quiet failures prevent a building from optimizing energy efficiency. Described that way, FDD reads as building health, and the departments came along.
By the time Ensmenger presented at NexusCon, the team had realized about a third of the roughly $185,000 it had identified, and it plans to work through the rest and extend the pilot to more buildings on campus.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.