Energy Management: Waste,waste everywhere, we never stop to think

Coleridge wrote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner with the famous line

"Water, water, every where,Nor any drop to drink."

English: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at age 42. Wikipedia)

Where our hero is blamed for their desperate thirst with sea water all around. You might feel like me a more relevant modern take would be...

"waste, waste everywhere,
we never stop to think".

So lets pause for a moment. We see widely published claims that the average building wastes 30% plus of its' energy. And I have no doubt that this is an underestimate, but for the rest of this post we will take it as exact fact for the purpose of argument. However, there is also the famous adage "Every building is different", so

If the "average" building is notional (it must be) - it is everywhere, and at the same time nowhere.

What does this mean ? It's a simple and obvious idea, but it has implications...

As an ideal if you magically made every building perfect you would save 30%.of total waste power.

This does not mean if you made half the buildings perfect you would save 15%.of total waste power.

Why not ? - Because you would need to know that the two halves were comparable.

If we consider all the buildings in the world ; it might be a very good statistical bet, just as, if you play roulette long enough, you are going to lose (unless it 's your wheel :).

But take just two buildings: One wastes 60% and the other wastes 0%

On average they waste 30% so it fits. (Ok unlikely but to illustrate)

Now suppose to visit a building costs a day trip costing say $500, but that all waste can be fixed in that single visit.

Suppose further that 30% losses cost $10 per day and that new causes of losses pop up at random every month in one building or another (yes its like herding cats - enjoy the video its sillier than me !)

Go to both buildings and you save 600 bucks at a cost of $1000 - lose 400 not good !

Go to only the right building and you save 600 bucks at a cost of 500 = 100 profit

Go to the wrong building only and you lose 500 for no benefit.

In this simple example knowing where the waste is, is worth 100 per month (without the right information you are better doing nothing !!!)

So there is a value in information - only if it informs a decision that changes the outcome.

Now the more buildings you have the greater the cost of travel, and the more random and uncertain the maintenance issues become.

In the simplest case two buildings - with average waste of 30% per day per building the information is worth ten times the daily cost. But a building like this would need to be wasting $ 3650 per year on energy with a fuel cost of around $10,000.

So we think $100 per month is too much to charge for our service to make sense in every building, So we went for the cost of a good cup of coffee per week (if coffee costs about $5 where you live)

Bottom line if your buildings have a fuel spend of over $1000 per annum (includes most houses let alone businesses) - and if they are "average" and if you have more than one or if you spend more than one discretionary day on site per year to save energy - you should probably be using kWIQly