e-Bench™ has a large number of clients and hundreds of sites. The following is an example of what e-Bench™ can achieve for your organisation.

 

e-Bench™ user -Joe Hollander, Massey University

Joe Hollander is Massey University's director of strategic facilities management. He's been working with ETS for around two years, trialling and fine-tuning e-Bench™.

Says Hollander: "It's a comprehensive package. We saw it would have benefits for the university so we decided to get in and assist. The difficulty is in collecting and inputting data for three campuses.

The university has campuses with 623 buildings covering 5000 hectares at Palmerston North, Wellington, Albany, Napier, New Plymouth and Ardmore Aviation School. Facilities range from barns to multi-storey buildings. Says Hollander: "The benefits [so far] are in the package's capabilities for energy efficient design. We've plucked out buildings on the Wellington, Palmerston North and Albany campuses and fed the data in. [E-Bench™] takes its structure, orientation, fenestration and other characteristics and determines whether it's energy efficient."

Hollander is using e-Bench™ to determine the university's CO2 emissions footprint, with the Kyoto Protocol in mind. He is conducting monitoring and targeting "manually" at the moment, and building support for energy efficiency among staff at the three campuses. In November, he gathered the university's building services staff and academics at a workshop to demonstrate what e-Bench™ had to offer. He sees opportunities for researchers in the science and engineering departments to use e-Bench™'s data-gathering and analysis capabilities for their research into healthy buildings.

Massey is using several e-Bench™ modules: Climatic, Building Design, Billing and Monitoring & Targeting.

Stream's time-of-use meters feed their half-hourly readings straight into e-Bench™. Meteorological data combines with information about the buildings and energy usage data to assess how energy efficient they are.

Hollander uses the software for invoice tracking and to ensure the energy bill tallies with actual consumption. It checks the spot market pricing to make sure the charges are correct.

"We've got different contracts and tariffs at the different sites. Using e-Bench™'s pricing module will help to cost usage."

Hollander finds e-Bench™ ideal for a large institutional organisation such as a university or health board. "It's very powerful." He looked at others, but found e-Bench™'s interactivity set it apart. "It may appear complex, but that's because it's so interactive."

Hollander says the university's winter 2003 energy saving campaign netted $150,000 of energy savings with basic measures during five months.