Bleuwave Controls

Energy Management & Optimization

Building Energy Management & HVAC Optimization

Scheduling, setpoints, resets, plant staging and after-hours runtime reviewed against how your building is actually occupied — using the data your controls system is already collecting.
  • Scheduling
  • SAT reset
  • Static pressure reset
  • Plant staging
  • Trend analysis
  • Metering
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Approach

Start with runtime, not equipment

The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one a fan never spends because nobody was in the building. Before anyone discusses equipment replacement or capital measures, it is worth knowing how many hours your systems run outside occupancy, how far your resets actually travel, and how often the plant stages up for a load that is not there.

Your BAS already has most of that data. What it usually lacks is someone reviewing it against how the building is genuinely used.

Arizona technician reviewing energy-conscious facility controls
Schedules, resets, staging and trends reveal practical opportunities to reduce avoidable runtime.
Controls technician commissioning building automation equipment in a mechanical room
Commercial facility operator reviewing building automation performance

Strategies

What an optimization review examines

  • Optimal start/stop and scheduling
  • Setpoint review across zones, systems and plant
  • Static-pressure reset
  • Supply-air-temperature reset
  • Chilled-water and hot-water reset
  • Plant staging and lead-lag rotation
  • Occupancy-based strategies and setback
  • Demand limiting where appropriate
  • Trend analysis for equipment behaviour and drift
  • Utility and meter integration
  • Fault detection and analytics readiness
  • After-hours usage identification
  • Override and manual-command cleanup
  • Lighting schedule and occupancy coordination

How a review runs

Optimization review

  1. Establish how the building is used

    Real occupancy hours by area, tenant variations, seasonal changes and special events.

  2. Collect trend data

    Enough history to see weekday, weekend and shoulder-season behaviour rather than a single snapshot.

  3. Audit schedules & overrides

    Every schedule, holiday calendar and manual override compared against actual occupancy.

  4. Review resets & setpoints

    How far each reset travels in practice, and whether any is pinned by a single problem zone.

  5. Examine plant behaviour

    Staging thresholds, minimum runtimes, short-cycling and simultaneous heating and cooling.

  6. Verify sensors driving decisions

    A reset is only as good as the sensor controlling it. Calibration is checked before conclusions are drawn.

  7. Prioritise findings

    Ranked by recoverable runtime and implementation effort — the no-cost schedule fixes separated from capital measures.

  8. Implement & measure

    Changes applied, then measured against the pre-change baseline over a comparable period.

Typical findings

What reviews usually turn up

What you’re seeing

Air handlers running 24/7 despite an occupied schedule of 6am–7pm.

How we approach it

Almost always an override left in place, a schedule at the wrong hierarchy level, or an after-hours request with no timeout.

What you’re seeing

Supply-air reset never leaves its minimum.

How we approach it

One zone with a stuck damper or a failed sensor is holding the reset down for the entire air system. Fix the zone and the reset starts working as designed.

What you’re seeing

Simultaneous heating and cooling on the same air system.

How we approach it

Usually excessive minimum airflows combined with a low supply-air temperature. Rebalancing the two removes reheat that was never necessary.

What you’re seeing

The chiller plant stages up briefly every morning then stages back down.

How we approach it

Staging thresholds and minimum runtimes tuned for a startup transient rather than a real load.

What you’re seeing

Lighting runs on the old operating hours after a tenant change.

How we approach it

Schedule matrix rebuilt against current occupancy — often the single largest recoverable block of runtime in a building.

What you’re seeing

Nobody can tell whether last year’s changes helped.

How we approach it

Baseline and post-change measurement windows defined up front, with weather-normalised comparison rather than raw month-over-month.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Usually not to start. The first pass draws on BAS trend data you already have — runtime, setpoints, valve and damper positions, temperatures. Metering makes the results easier to quantify in dollars and is worth adding, but the operational findings do not depend on it. We would rather show you the runtime waste first and let that justify the metering investment than the other way round.

By defining the baseline before the change, not after. We record a comparable period ahead of time, apply one meaningful change at a time where possible, then measure over a matched window with weather normalisation for anything weather-dependent. We also record what else changed in the building during that period, because ignoring confounders is how optimization projects end up claiming savings they did not produce.

They overlap heavily. Retro-commissioning is broader — it verifies that systems perform as intended across all their functions, including safety and sequence behaviour. An optimization review is narrower and focused on energy and runtime. In practice, an optimization review often uncovers commissioning deficiencies, and we will tell you when the right answer is the larger exercise.

Yes. Most optimization work is on existing systems from other contractors. What we need is read access to trends and schedules, and enough access to implement the changes once you approve them. If the platform restricts that, we will tell you what is possible before quoting.

Related capabilities

Next step

Request an optimization review

Tell us the facility, roughly what equipment is involved, and what your occupancy actually looks like. If you can export a few weeks of trend data, we can often point to the first three things worth changing before we ever visit.
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