Heat Doctor

Project Summary

BCIT’s Energy Specialist, Andrea Linsky began her rounds as the Heat Doctor in November 2010. This process reviewed excessive heating in trade shops on campus and reset existing heating set points in order to lower the temperature, make the students and staff a bit more comfortable and help reduce BCIT’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Project Description

Andrea sat down with BCIT’s carpentry chief instructor and BCIT’s facilities department to review the computer controlled building heating system and made some changes to the heating programming. The carpentry students were often quite hot during the winter months as they do manual labor during the day and had to open the large bay doors to keep cool. This was a unique case where the temperature of the room was too warm even at normal room temperature level. In order to make the students more comfortable and to save some energy they set the heat level down to 16 degrees C (from 18-20 degrees C depending on the heater) and they interlocked the doors with the heaters. If the bay doors were open, the heat dropped to 10 degrees C.

Results

This project was such a success that BCIT saved around 270 GJ of natural gas and 14 tonnes of CO2eq during the heating season in one small building.

Lessons Learned

Heat can be wasted just like water and it is being wasted other places on campus.  This year Green Team’s Heat Savers task force has set up Heat Doctor appointments with each of the 8 other trades buildings on campus in order to look for other heat saving opportunities.