Your thermostat is calling, but is your Rooftop Unit (RTU) listening? Within a few days of opening a new restaurant, one of our customers noticed, via SiteSage energy monitoring, that their RTUs were running their supply fans 24/7, even though their thermostat was set to switch fan control to “auto” when the restaurant was un-occupied. Armed with irrefutable energy data, the customer went on a quest to find out why the fans were running “out of control”.

As it turned out, as part of their new building commissioning process, a company had performed an air balance calibration and had overridden the thermostat on the RTU control board for their testing. With testing complete, the tech had forgotten to remove the overriding “jumper” and the fans had run constantly since then.

It goes to show that sometimes just having a good controls system is only half the story; sometimes you need data on how the unit is responding (or not!) to those controls. As our customer said, “I never would have known this without SiteSage. I wonder how much it would have cost me in energy?”

Interested in learning more about how to choose an Energy Management System for Restaurants & Retail?