Teachers at Sutton Park Community Primary School in Kidderminster
are doing their best to ensure that their pupils do not take the
world’s natural resources for granted. They are being helped in
this quest by the site’s novel Trend building energy management
system (BEMS), part of whose function is to educate the children
about the importance of energy conservation and sustainable living.
In January 2010, Sutton Park Primary and its 240 pupils moved into
brand new school buildings designed by Worcestershire County
Council’s own Property Services team of architects and building
services engineers. In contrast to the ageing premises they
left behind, their current home is distinguished by low energy
design and a strong emphasis on renewable resources, which include a
wood-chip fuelled biomass boiler and a rainwater harvesting system.
Good insulation and tight control and monitoring of the heating
system by the Trend BEMS have helped ensure a high level of energy
efficiency. In fact, heating costs are predicted to be less than
half those of the old school, even though the new buildings have a
larger floor area (2,000m² compared with, 624m²).
Sutton Park Community Primary is one of numerous Worcestershire
County Council schools and buildings that are fitted with a Trend
BEMS. All these systems are centrally managed from County Hall in
Worcester, many of them via the council’s intranet. From
here, using Trend '963’ supervisors (graphical operator interfaces),
the council’s engineers can adjust control settings and view system
monitored data such as room temperatures and CO² concentrations
within the schools, heating plant operation and, in some cases,
utility meter readings. The pupils at Sutton Park can also look at
BEMS collected data about their school - through custom-designed,
child-friendly graphic pages that Trend created at the council’s
request.
Uniquely, the interactive pages are displayed on whiteboards in the
classrooms; they are accessed over the school’s IT network from an
on-site ‘963’ server. This is done using a web browser that runs on
a laptop connected to the whiteboard. Several classrooms can
have access simultaneously, each being able to view whichever pages
they wish.
Using simply worded text, animated graphics and a pictorial style
familiar to a young audience, the children are shown how their
classrooms are kept warm and their hand washing water is heated, and
how rainwater is collected and used for flushing toilets.
The displays contain live and historic data collected by the BEMS,
such as current temperature values and cumulative energy and
mains/rain water consumption. Another page, which aims to encourage
energy saving behaviour, gives the electricity usage or each
classroom area - for the current day, the last month and the year to
date. In the school’s library there is a Trend EnergyEYE, which
provides a permanent display of the
latest energy consumption figures – and their CO² equivalents – on
a large plasma screen.
The ‘963’ supervisor pages available to the council’s engineers are
obviously much more detailed than those produced for the school.
They give an in-depth picture of the operation and status of the
heating system – including plant alarms – and provide data to aid
the diagnosis of faults. They also enable changes to heating times
and room and flow temperature setpoints.
The 100kW biomass boiler that serves the school’s radiator circuits
is one of numerous similar units that Worcestershire County Council
has installed in its premises to help meet its carbon reduction
target in a cost-effective fashion. There is also a 130kW gas-fired
boiler, though this is only enabled if the biomass plant is unable
to achieve the required flow temperature unaided or if it cannot
operate for some reason. Domestic hot water is supplied by a
separate gas boiler.
One of the duties of the Trend BEMS is to maximise use of the
biomass unit. This means it must allow for the boiler’s relatively
long warm-up period. Thus, the BEMS not only computes the daily
optimum start time for each heating circuit but also takes the
earliest time calculated – and the outside air temperature – and
works out how many hours in advance it must fire up the biomass
plant. This ensures that the buffer tank it charges is up to
temperature when needed.
To minimise unnecessary use of energy, the school is divided into
three heating zones; each has a variable temperature heating circuit
that is independently controlled by the BEMS. The classrooms are
divided into two zones – north and south - while the main hall and
admin area constitute the third. This means that the hall can be
used outside school hours without having to bring the heating on in
other areas.
The BEMS’s control and monitoring functions are carried out by a
single Trend IQ controller. Two smaller IQs log readings from the
various utility meters for downloading by the system supervisor. In
addition to the main electricity and gas meters, there are nine
electricity sub-meters, a gas meter on the DHW generator, a heat
meter on the biomass boiler and mains water and rainwater meters.
Worcestershire County Council installed its first BEMS some 25 years
ago and now has centrally managed systems in just over 250 of its
sites, the vast majority of which are schools, though they also
include offices, libraries and residential homes. Trend has supplied
101 of these systems, the first of them having been installed during
the late nineteen nineties. There are also Trend intelligent
controls in 44 village primary schools, which have energy bills of
less than £2,000 per year each. Most are equipped with just a small
stand - alone IQ controller and the sites are centrally monitored by
the council on a reactive basis.
Though the child-friendly graphics used at Sutton Park are the first
such screen displays that Trend has produced, the adaptability of
the ‘963’ supervisor meant they were not difficult to create. Nor
will it be hard to change them. Following feedback received from the
school, it is now intended to modify and develop the displays with a
view to establishing this innovative teaching aid as part of the
curriculum.
|
E-mail Trend Control Systems |