Sinking Springs Elementary School in York, Pa., part of Central York School District, is saving $170,000 annually after completing energy-efficiency upgrades with the help of InsideIQ Building Automation Alliance member NRG Controls Inc. of Harrisburg, Pa.
NRG, which serves commercial and public-sector clients in central Pennsylvania, partnered with the district to benchmark utility costs and implement upgrades at the 89,000-sq-ft school, which was built in 2000. NRG concluded that investing $524,000 in a building-automation-system (BAS) upgrade, burner retrofits, integration of the boiler into the BAS, and a chiller replacement would increase energy efficiency and improve occupant comfort for the more than 700 students and staff members at the fourth-through-sixth-grade school.
“NRG’s energy-cost-savings analysis determined that completing the recommended projects would lower energy use and costs enough to allow the district to achieve a full return on its investment in approximately three years,” Jay Fantaski, vice president, operations, NRG Controls, said. “Because we were able to complete the project in six months, the school district did not have to wait to begin to see that ROI.”
The BAS upgrades at Sinking Springs Elementary involved utilization of Lon and Modbus protocols and included the addition of a supervisory graphical user interface, system programing, graphics generation, sequence optimization, and a complete data-transfer interface to the BAS via Modbus. NRG also upgraded two burner assemblies with auto flame control, added variable-frequency drives, and installed a new 225-ton chiller. Equipment and systems from various manufacturers, such as Tridium, Schneider Electric, Trane, Limpsfield, and Square D, were integrated using the BAS.