Energy+Evaluation+Page

Example evaluation, just add your brief statement below the previous one. Be sure to include your name.

Deane W: I looked at the week starting Jan. 14th comparing temperature with steam use to heat the building, and one day (Tuesday) didn't make much sense. See:

Amy F: I looked at lighting usage in the last month in Aiken. According to the dashboard, the usage for lighting last month was 343 kWh. Keys Energy said that the average 6-8 room house uses about 60 kWh per month for lighting. So considering that Aiken has many more rooms than that, and has lighting that stays on for hours at a time in most of the rooms, the number on the dashboard makes sense and seems fairly low considering how much higher it could be. http://www.keysenergy.com/appliances.

Lily B: According to the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html) a family of 4 uses on average 400 gallons of water a day and the toilet uses 27% of that water, so the toilet uses 108 gallons a day.The dashboard reports that the Aiken building uses about 1000 gallons of water every day, which is probably mostly used by the toilets. That is about how much a 40 person household would use on toilets. So this number seems quiet low because way more than 40 people are probably using the toilet in Aiken everyday so it seems the building is doing pretty good with water usage.

Brittany L: I looked at the water usage for today and it was 860 gallons. According to the USGS, on average, it takes about 4 gallons of water to flush and toilet and wash your hands.This means that about 58 people were able to use the bathroom today. Assuming the toilets are newer and only use about 1.3 gallons per flush, plus 1 gallon to wash hands, about 89 people would be able to use the bathroom today. This seems about accurate, considering how many people occupy Aiken every day.

James F: I looked at water usage for the Aiken center last year and saw that it was 214,556 gallons in a year. Based off the website http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html, a household can you 400 gallons of water per day. Extrapolating that to a whole year, a household uses around 146,000 gallons of water in a day. It makes sense that the Aiken center uses more water because it has to service more people form students coming in at different times of the day, to teachers that work there all through the day. For fun, I asked my mom how much electricity we used in a day and it was 54.4 kWh in a day. Looking at the Aiken center, it used 87 kWh in a day. Sine the Aiken center is bigger and houses more people it would make sense. I do not know the square feet of the Aiken building, but house is 3000 square feet. [comment: from post above 1000 gal/day time 365 days would be 365,000 gal/year; everyone in the ball park?]

Monika H: I looked at the energy usage for the computer lab last year, which was 589 kWh. The standard for a single Energy Star category A desktop is <=148.0 kWh. Either the computer lab is crazy efficient, the room is not used very much, or something is screwy because there are approximately 30 computers in that room. [comment: what is the unit of time in your data... all years?]

Nick Brown: I looked at Total electricity use over the last year. The Aiken Center used 22,762 KWh of electricity. According to The U.S Energy Information Administration, the average U.S residential utility customers consumed 11,496. This means that the Aiken Center uses a little less than twice the amount of electricity of an average household. Taking into account the size of the building and the amount of people using the building, I would say the building is pretty efficient. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

Jessica Mason: Over the month of December, the Aiken building consumed 2499.6 kWh of energy. Of this total value, lighting and HVAC electricity use accounted for 1591 kWh, or 63.7%. According to Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, about 70% of the energy use in K-12 schools is for heating, cooling, and lighting (http://www.schoolenergysaving.com/schoolEnergyFacts.php). Therefore, in comparison to other school buildings, Aiken is slightly more efficient in managing these sources of heavy energy consumption.

Daniel Busi- I looked at the total amount of Carbon released by Aiken in the month of December. For the total 31 days, Aiken only released .44 tones of Carbon. That is the equivalent to about 49 gallons of gasoline, close to one full barrel of crude oil. While that number is low, I still believe that the Aiken center has the capability to be more efficient in lowering the amount of Co2 released since it is one of the greenest buildings in the Northeast. http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html#results

John Koo- I looked at the total amount of BTU's used for heating this month. For a total of 31 days, Aiken Building consumed 727 btu's. That is equivalent to 28 people's monthly average btu usage. For a big building carrying more than 28 people at a time for the majority of the da, that is very impressive.

Stone Lieberman- I looked at the total electricity use for last year. Over the year, Aiken Building consumed 22,762 Kilowatt-Hours, which left a carbon footprint of 4.0 tonnes. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 5.1 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This means the Aiken Building is more efficient than operating a car, which is very good for such a large building. www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/420f11041.pdf

Brad Koontz - I looked at figures for the total electricity use during the day and took a closer look at the time of day. I was looking to see if there would be an obvious trend of use during peak hours versus off peak hours overnight. Although there is an obvious difference between the average usage during the day and overnight (~4.8 vs. ~2.7) it is not as drastic as I thought it may be. I understand that there are certain systems that will continue to run overnight but am wondering if there are things that can be done to drop the off peak electricity usage, which may help drop peak usage as well.

Zack Henrikson: I looked at the energy consumption for this week. The energy usage has gone down as the weather has heated up, but now the energy level is at 126 kWh/day, which is the highest of the week. I was a little confused because today is the warmest day so far of the week at 54 degrees fahrenheit so I would have assumed the energy usage would have been a lot less than previous days.

Grayson Webb: I looked at the grey water usage from last week and monday's usage was at 200 gallons while tuesday, wednesday and thursday were all about 1,000 and fridays was 633. why would mondays be so low?

Morgan Marzo: The energy usage was interesting because the plug load and the HVAC were the highest, although the computers were said to be using very little energy at only .44 kw hours which seemed odd.