David King calls himself a redneck engineer, but he’s really a smart building cowboy.
An industry veteran, King relies on years of hands-on wrangling of water-sewer-electricity-heat-AC-whatnot systems to inform today’s world of myriad sensors for pressure, temperature and other data routed through savvy software to capitalize on energy savings.
His formal title is Director of Energy Management. In his current world, large electronics displays offer him minute details about massive CityPlex Towers office and health care complex paired with a fully functioning 300-acre Oral Roberts University next door, both in Tulsa, Okla.
Over the years, he’s discovered things that other savvy building operations engineers know in their hearts, like this: turning up the temperature in a shower room in winter means the college dorm residents don’t warm themselves for nearly as long taking hot showers. Pump up room air temp to save on water—right, we get it. But can you quantify it? That’s where the smart tech comes in handy to back up his cowboy instinct.
Across the 5 million square feet operation where King works, however, it takes 15,500 sensors and smart monitoring software with a team of capable co-workers to bolster cost savings. First, you need to know how many gallons of water a college dorm uses in an hour to be able to know how to economize on it. But always, it requires a commitment by managers to find energy savings, no matter whether the political world wafts from pro-environment to less so.
“I feel like every building has opportunities for savings,” he said in an interview with Fierce. “I enjoy the hunt of trying to save energy. Anything I can do that saves energy is a good use of my time to pursue. That’s not only for cost savings but to be a good steward of our environment. Before I started, the CityPlex Towers were one of the worst energy hogs out there.”
That was in 2010 when King came on as operations manager and the structures were “hemorrhaging, as far as utilities.” The three towers of the former City of Faith center, built in the late 1970s to cure cancer, were comprised of a 60-story clinic, 30-story tower for 770 hospital beds and a 20-story research center. There were pneumatic controls to run 320 air handling units, half of which kept pumping out AC 24x7. One of the first things King did was install variable frequency drives that were networked with Cat 5 cable, to monitor and prevent constant operation with demand-based speed adjustments. By 2013, the facility saw natural gas consumption down by 20%, electrical down by 50% and water consumption down by 50%. He used the cost savings partly to prop up operations and salaries for licensed engineers.
With a large university infrastructure next to an aging CityPlex, the demands for greater utility data and control were growing. He investigated building operation controls from major outfits like Siemens and Honeywell offering systems costing in the millions. Instead, he settled on what is now the Mango platform from Radix IoT (originally developed by Infinite Automation), which he said has helped drop demand charges for power by 35%, resulting in $20 million in savings over the past decade. (That savings derives from seeing demand of 6,500 kw dropped to 4,000 kw from each side of the campus-CityPlex operation.)
Working with Radix IoT’s cloud-native Mango platform, ORU/CityPlex has been able to see $100,000 in annual energy savings with a 20% decline in demand charges, according to Radix IoT. King said Mango offers a big advantage over other software with its interoperability with other systems. He relies on Tridium’s Niagara framework to pull data into the Mango platform. Mango allows King’s team to create graphics for quick overviews of buildings, floors and devices for the big picture of multiple systems. He’s also found Mango easier and less cumbersome than other systems he’s tried.
With Mango and his cowboy mindset, King can tick off a few things he’s learned about building operatins (in addition to the abovementioned air temp/shower water tradeoff.) Water and sewer costs have tripled in Tulsa since 2013, so cutting down on toilets constantly flushing is a big concern.
“It costs more money to have one single toilet flushing than 75 tons of AC,” he discovered. Sensors can monitor an entire building’s water cycles to show if water usage is high at 3 am when it shouldn’t be, which can point maintenance crews to where the problem is. AI and logic in IoT can help eliminate nuisance alarms in a large operation.
In another example, he figured out how to capture 10,000 gallons of condensate on a summer day from air handlers and cooling towers to repurpose it for use in the cooling towers. The benefit: he gets chilled water for repurposing that doesn’t have the minerals and other materials that he normally would have to remove. The chillers dissipate heat through the evaporated water.
The solution he’s come up with is a “drop in the bucket of what’s needed” with 10,000 gallons of condensate, but it’s a start. “The biggest thing I’ve learned in the last 15 years is how fast tech is changing. If you don’t understand something, with AI, you now have a conversation with a computer. You’re not limited any longer.”
Or to put it another way, a good cowboy knows when it's time to mount another horse.