Energy-Efficient Buildings – New Code Regulations are Here

How to prepare for changing energy efficiency building codes to avoid costly fines

As energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction mandates continue to evolve, building owners, property managers, architects, and facility managers require cost-effective solutions to help them meet compliance, avoid costly penalties, and work within limited operating budgets.

Let’s discuss three steps commercial buildings can take to comply with the changing energy efficiency regulations.

1.  Do an Energy Audit

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted. The challenge for most commercial building owners and property managers is that they lack the data to pinpoint their energy consumption and areas of wastage.

An energy audit is the first step in making a commercial building efficient. It involves an examination of a building’s energy-consuming infrastructure to identify cost-savings opportunities. Some of the factors an energy audit looks into include:

• Utility bill analysis to understand your current energy costs
• An on-site survey of the building to evaluate all the lighting, heating, and energy-consuming systems and equipment
• Calculating equipment performance and runtime
• Reviewing the construction drawings where possible
• Testing for energy leakage in insulation, duct leakage, heating systems, ventilation systems, and equipment energy draws.

2.  Set Your Energy Goals

Adopting energy conservation measures takes time, especially for an existing commercial building. Once you do an energy audit, the next step is setting goals for your building’s energy consumption and costs.

Setting goals helps you identify priorities that will help your business get close to achieving its energy efficiency goals. This does not necessarily mean tearing down your heating and ventilation system – it can be making minor changes to eliminate the small energy losses that seem negligible, such as lighting. We’ll cover a few of the cost-savings opportunities for commercial buildings in the next step.

3.  Identify Cost-Savings Opportunities

An energy audit gives you a clear view of how much energy your building consumes and energy consumption costs. You can also identify cost-savings opportunities based on your current infrastructure.

Such opportunities could be as simple as ensuring your building maintains a temperature range in summer and winter to reduce heating and cooling costs. This can be through applications such as environmentally friendly insulation.

Some energy-efficient solutions you can implement include:

Install Commercial Building Window Films

The US Department of Energy recommends window film technology for energy conservation. Not only is window film effective at reducing energy consumption, but it also has a short payback period of as little as three years.

How does commercial window film work?

3M™ Window Film is the recommended window film technology for energy efficiency both during summer and winter. It works by reducing light pollution and the amount of heat entering a building.

Window film is installed directly on existing windows, which reduces your building’s carbon footprint in two ways. First, window films such as 3M window films can lower your building’s overall energy costs by blocking up to 78% of the sun’s heat entering a building through the windows in the summer months and insulating from heat loss in winter. Second, commercial window films are applied to existing windows rather than installing new replacement windows. This reduces waste in landfills, saves money, and reduces business interruptions from replacing windows.

Read more about the benefits of Commercial Window Film.

Update Lighting

Commercial buildings waste energy through lighting in two ways:

• Using lighting resources when not needed (for instance, a light left on in an office overnight)
• Over-lighting (providing more electric lighting than is required).

Whether indoors or outdoors, commercial buildings can adopt measures to ensure that they are using only the amount of light needed when it’s needed. Motion sensor lights are a good investment that lights up a room when someone walks in.

Reduce the HVAC load  

Many commercial building owners, facility managers, and property managers, often look for HVAC improvements first, which can lead to unnecessary expenses. By utilizing other building envelope improvements such as window film installation, you can improve the overall insulation of the building, thus downsizing your HVAC needs and reducing energy consumption without expensive HVAC capital improvements.

If you conduct a thorough energy audit, you can identify areas with more lighting than is necessary and reduce these to the required amount. It can also include more energy-efficient lighting solutions such as LED lamps.