School District Cuts Scheduling Time 99%
Events2HVAC, September 15, 2014Last year, Jim Urbanski, Energy Manager at Wicomico County Public Schools in Maryland, spent 20 hours each week scheduling heating and air conditioning for after-school events. This year he spends just 20 minutes to schedule two weeks of events. That is a 99% reduction in labor hours, and he isn’t done yet.
Urbanski started working at Wicomico five years ago and quickly realized that they were running HVAC systems late into the night to make sure rooms were comfortable for evening events scheduled at their 24 schools. He knew the school system was losing money, wasting energy, and causing unnecessary wear and tear on their HVAC systems. So he changed the HVAC schedules to cover only the school day and began manually scheduling after-hours events – 17,000 of them in the 2013-2014 school year.
“I actually built the monster myself,” Urbanski said. “Because when I shortened up the occupied time to end at the end of the school day, anything that happened after the school day I now had to put in as an exception schedule. It was well worth the money we were saving in energy, but it was taking about 20 hours per week to do the scheduling.”