Watson: I noticed that you received an email this week from an engineer who had been looking at our clients list and project results on our website. He was specifically interested in knowing what we did to reduce the annual energy costs by 35% in a 20 building school system. How did you answer him Holmes?
Holmes: I told him that the answer would be the same no matter which of our projects he was interested in. The first step was always to install instrumentation to monitor the main utility meters as well as the significant energy systems. The monitoring system was designed to track when, where and how efficiently the energy was being used.
We didn't do Energy Audits. Estimating possible savings would have been a waste of our time and money. We were focused on producing actual savings as quickly as possible; our only fees were a percentage of documented savings each month. Installing the monitoring system as the first step allowed us proceed directly to our objective and begin to reduce the costs as soon as each point was activated. Plus, the monitoring system provided all of the same data an Energy Audit would have but it was much more accurate as it was measured data rather than estimated data.