Recently, we caught up with Les Hewlett, the Energy Efficiency & Sustainability Engineer for the City of Fayetteville, North Carolina to discuss how UtilityTrac Plus has been useful in helping the city identify $60,000 in savings in the past year alone.
Here is their story:
UtilityTrac Plus has been a significant help in our ability to identify and investigate anomalies in our utility use and cost.
During our energy assessment of our fire stations, we noticed that one was costing twice as much as an identical fire station. When we dug into this with the utility company, we found that one had the wrong ratio on the current transformer, so it was doubling the energy use. We were able to get a refund for the past three years, totaling $17,000.
Another situation we were able to identify was with the water consumption at one of our parks where we noticed that the park was using an excessive amount of water.
We found a problem with a pump control and we also realized that the park’s water was being billed at the wrong rate. Luckily, we were able to identify these problems quickly and rectify the issues. The charts in UtilityTrac Plus were great! They really showed this graphically, so it was easier to spot.
A feature we love is the benchmarking. I was able to group all our sports field lighting together in UtilityTrac Plus and saw that some of the fields were very expensive compared to the rest.
I found that because the meters also serviced a concession stand they were on a much higher rate. I learned that if we metered the concession stands and lights separately and if we could go two months without turning on the field lights, we could get the billing rate significantly reduced. The result is that we’ll save thousands of dollars per year.
By grouping and benchmarking my water meters in UtilityTrac Plus, I was able to find that we were being billed for more than thirty water meters that are no longer in use. The savings from removing these will be about $3,000 per year.
UtilityTrac Plus has an edge over any of the other energy software programs out there. We examined several tools and went with this one because it’s easy to use and gives a lot of information. I’m very satisfied with UtilityTrac Plus as it’s been a very useful tool for us.
If you'd like a .pdf version of the case study, please download the document below.
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