Lighting opportunities are treated slightly differently from other opportunities, to take advantage of tools to speed up data entry and to automate the analysis. A ManagingEnergy lighting analysis is very detailed, providing room-by-room and fixture-by-fixture recommendations, involving potentially hundreds of small retrofits for a facility. It is unworkable to report on individual lighting retrofits along with mechanical plant retrofits.
ManagingEnergy provides an elegant way to bring lighting and mechanical opportunities together for management-level reporting. The lighting analysis is first completed, then the lighting results are consolidated into a single Opportunity.
Click Roll Up Lighting Opportunity. You will be prompted to select the electrical consumption meter component that will be impacted by the lighting retrofits.
Lighting Impacts on More Than One Electrical Meter
It is possible, but uncommon, that the lighting opportunity could impact more than one electrical meter. ManagingEnergy does not explicitly provide for this situation, since lighting records are not assigned to a particular electrical meter. This shortcoming can be handled manually, by allocating the calculated impact among the meters after the opportunity has been rolled up. The user can then print out detailed lighting reports and work through each record manually to get a high degree of accuracy; however, that effort is unlikely to be worth the time spent. The overall savings amount, which will still be calculated accurately by ManagingEnergy, is likely to be more important than a precise allocation by electrical meter. An analyst who understands the building should be able to come up with a quick percentage estimate close enough for anyone who would be using the results of the audit.
Any artificial light source also produces heat, which contributes to building heating in winter and adds to the cooling load in summer. Lighting retrofits will change these effects. ManagingEnergy does not calculate heating/cooling effects, so they must be calculated and entered separately if the energy analyst wants them included. |