Holiday Energy Setbacks Pay Back for Residence Halls

We want to share the results of our community effort to save energy and money over the holiday break by setting back thermostats about five degrees in unoccupied spaces and asking everyone to unplug personal items while away.  We worked with Residence Life to identify specific areas in the Residence Halls, and with Facilities’ Maintenance HVAC and our building controls vendors, Siemens and CMS, to schedule setbacks starting December 13 and ending January 4.

A graph of the electrical energy kWh used hourly for each Residence Hall shows the results. As you can see, the usage dropped to a lower level December 13, with a dip on December 19 when power was shut off for a few hours to the campus for Maintenance.

The estimated electricity saved for the three weeks from December 13 to January 3 was 23,781 kWh for a savings of $1,867. This is 29% of the normal cost of energy used during a comparable period in November. Thank you to all for this successful effort in the Residence Halls.