Ever wondered what our customers think of PointGuard. Kameron McCloskey, Director of Solution Sales sat down with a current customer to understand exactly how they are using the PointGuard Platform and what benefits they’ve seen. Chris Lelle is the Portfolio Chief Engineer for Lincoln Property Company of Atlanta. We recently sat down with Chris for a webinar on the very topic, the full video of which can be found here.

PointGuard: “Lets get somethings out of the way first. You are a PointGuard Pro+ user. LPC has 11 buildings connected to the platform, totaling 1.61 M square feet. So what has your experience with PointGuard been like thus far?”

Chris: In the buildings that PointGuard is active, we have been able to enhance the service we provide as a third-party property manager and/or owner operator. Our engineers cannot stare at Piu/VAVs all day every day, so PointGuard makes easy it easy to look at exactly how equipment is functioning or not functioning. Seeing the trend data allows us to diagnose or create workorder to trouble shoot.

We are currently running buildings at twice the square footage per engineer than the industry standard was 15 years ago.

PointGuard: “How did you find PointGuard, more specifically maybe what issues were popping up for your teams or your buildings that you wanted to address that led you to seek out an analytics solution?”

Chris: We were Looking to provide better service - next level service really. We already had a highly engaged team focused on energy reduction and focused on lowering those operating costs. However, as I said we cannot be everywhere at once and building drift is very real. If temperature sensors are off by 1-2 degrees, that can drive energy costs up 3-5%. If we don’t catch that over the course of months, that can throw off our energy costs/ square foot goal for the rest of the year. PointGuard captures that fault or error almost immediately, and again the trend data can help us diagnose that very quickly before costs go up significantly.

Additionally on the runtime side, PointGuard allows us to be really proactive. When one piece of equipment is turned on in error or left turned on 24/7 after a special event where it should have been reprogramed to the normal operating schedule, we can see significant energy increases. Not only is that piece of equipment now running unnecessarily, but it can cause 3-5 others to turn on and cause more trouble.

PointGuard gets to a granular level beyond pumps, chillers, SWUDs to look at granular data for all equipment such as PIUs/VAVs/etc. to ensure that they are all running against the correct building schedule. If they are not, the PointGuard dashboards and reports have quick ways of alerting us.

PointGuard: “What is the tool or dashboard or feature that your team uses the most or gets the most value out of?”

Chris: The Runtime Report I mentioned continues to catch things which get out of whack. In just one building as an example, we had 22 pieces of equipment with excessive runtime. That has dropped to 0 now. One of the important things this has helped us maintain is our high energy costs/ square foot standards, even as buildings ramped up to being fully occupied again.

The scatterplot as well provides a fast and efficient way to look at equipment that is not performing properly. I am working to make all the building engineers pull this up on a daily basis. No only is it so efficient as a tool, because it quickly pulls up faults, but also quickly pull up the trend data in the automation system.

PointGuard: ”What is something you would tell other facility teams that are looking at using analytics solutions like ours, that maybe they are not considering?”

Chris: I would say a couple of things about PointGuard. First, engineers cannot always look at data in real-time. They simply don’t have the time to spend all day in the BMS/BAS, but PointGuard enables this, by looking at all that trend data for you and producing visualizations and reports that point to the underlying issues. For example, lower space temps indicate a damper might not be open. The archaic way to fix this was to wait for a workorder, but now our engineers can see it thoroughly in real-time.

Secondly, the system more than offsets its costs. Despite having most of our buildings on the low-end of energy costs/ square foot for our area, we have been able to find even more savings while using PointGuard.

And lastly, we have found that this allows us to provide a higher level of service to Class A clients. The comfort complaints in our buildings have gone down drastically in the 3 years we have been with PointGuard, meaning our tenants our happier and our engineers are not spending all their time on hot/cold calls. We are delivering the temperature setpoints people are asking for, and allocating our resources better.