Laramar Group gets $75,000 in annual energy saving identified

Challenge

Over the last 30 years, Laramar has grown from a small real estate investment company to a vertically integrated, multi-billion-dollar portfolio. This growth has been fueled by a meticulous attention to detail and unwavering maintenance standards for their assets.

However, despite the best efforts of the managers and on-site staff, equipment issues would go undetected, resulting in unnecessary damage to equipment and an increase in costs due to earlier-than-expected replacements.

As importantly, because operators were largely reactive to tenant discomfort, Laramar’s team was concerned that the friction could increase the chance of vacancies.

To address this challenge, Laramar began evaluating solutions, including the Enertiv Platform.

Solution

Laramar selected two buildings in the Chatsworth Business Park, a 230,000 square foot office complex in Southern California, as the site for the first phase of deploying Enertiv’s technology.

Enertiv installed sensors to track the performance of 43 pieces of critical equipment.

As part of the standard process, the Enertiv client success team onboarded Laramar’s operations team on how to use the platform with a focus on their specific goals.

Within weeks, the Enertiv Platform began firing automated notifications to the on-site staff alerting them to malfunctioning equipment.

Result

In addition to notifying operators that an HVAC unit was short cycling and another was not turning on at the right time, Enertiv’s client success team took a deep dive into the data in preparation for the first quarterly review.

The insight review uncovered a number of optimizations that have been verified to reduce maintenance and repair costs in Enertiv’s other client portfolios.

One example is the recommendation to distribute the runtime hours of condenser water pumps by alternating which pumps operate to every two to three weeks instead of running one continuously for several months.

The client success team also identified that the temperature set point for an HVAC system was too low, accelerating wear and tear on the system by causing it to cycle on and off rapidly.

The maintenance insights were coupled with a series of energy-saving optimizations that combined to $75,000 in annual savings, a potential 440% return on the first year’s cost of ownership.

These optimization opportunities included:

$32,192 by Optimizing A/C Set Points
The chief engineer had raised the set point for one A/C unit to 62°F because some tenants were too cold. Enertiv’s experience indicated that all 4 A/C units could be raised to 65°F without sacrificing tenant comfort.

$22,745 by Optimizing Condenser Water Pump Schedules
The schedule for the condenser water pumps for one of the two buildings was from 6:00AM–6:15PM. However in the other building, the condenser water pumps turned on at 1:15AM, well before any tenants would occupy the office building.

$13,883 by Reducing Pump Speeds Through a VFD InstallationIn
addition to suboptimal schedules, the condenser water pumps would not ramp up or down with A/C usage requirements. The Enertiv team recommended reducing pump speeds by 15% with variable frequency drives (VFDs), which have been shown in other client portfolios to deliver an 18–24 month payback.

$6,045 by Optimizing A/C Schedules
Similarly to the inefficient pump schedules, Enertiv identified that multiple A/C units were turning on between 1AM–3AM.