PUBLIC HOLIDAY BMS SCHEDULING

Your BMS contains the time schedules that automates the operation of much of your plant and equipment. A feature within most, if not all, BMS systems allows you to identify specific dates as public holidays and have the plant and equipment operate at a different time schedule, in many places they are simply set to match the time schedules used for a Sunday. Programming of the public holiday dates would take your BMS technician minutes to achieve, in fact it is so simply you would be forgiven for thinking that this is done as a matter of routine. Unfortunately you would be wrong, plenty of times when enquiring why public holidays have not been programmed the reply is simply that 'no one has ever asked me too'.

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Before implementation

Every building is different and how the facility is used varies business to business, you will need to give consideration as to how, if at all, your building is occupied on a public holiday. Do you have any staff working that require heating and ventilation or lighting to be programmed on? Your BMS service engineer will need to understand how you want the building to operate and they can do the rest.

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Potential reductions

Making some assumptions about your energy usage, detailed below, you can calculate the potential saving from this initiative.​

• Assuming 8 days per year are public holidays and there are 252 normal working days and 105 weekend days

• Assume your building uses 5% of a normal business days energy on a weekend day

• Assume your building utilization on a public holiday is the same as that of a Sunday

• Assume that without programming your BMS to reflect the public holiday you would only use 80% of the energy of a normal day, as some of the load is user generated.

Using these assumptions you can calculate that you would save 2.16% of your annual energy consumption through scheduling your building to treat your years worth of public holidays in the same way as a Sunday!

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Maintaining the benefit

Do not assume that because you had a BMS engineering program the last batch of public holidays that they will think to continue to program future public holidays, past experience suggest that that would be optimistic. It is recommended that you amend your service contract with the BMS service provider to include a requirement that at least every 6 months they check the next 12 months worth of public holidays have been scheduled and update the scheduling as required.

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Note

We have used the term BMS generically to mean any building control system which schedules and controls plant and equipment. In many facilities the system which controls your lighting, a lighting control system, will be referred to separately, as a distinct system to the BMS and is often maintained by a different specialist vendor. Exactly the same public holiday scheduling practices apply to lighting control systems , however you may need to be specific in your request to your maintenance teams to ensure that all relevant systems are addressed and not just 'the BMS'.