Susan Hall, Office Manager at Chapelwood United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, said she “made a beeline” for the Events2HVAC booth at the Dean Evans EMS Users’ Conference last September. Today she is reaping the benefits because she is no longer manually scheduling heating and air conditioning for 100 rooms (120,000 square feet) of the Chapelwood campus.
“It is working well, and I am not spending my Fridays programming the air conditioning anymore for the following week, which is perfect for me.” (Susan Hall)
“It is working well,” Hall said, “and I am not spending my Fridays programming the air conditioning anymore for the following week, which is perfect for me.”
Chapelwood has a WebCTRL® system by AutomatedLogic and uses EMS for room scheduling.
Hall said the biggest obstacle she faced in implementing the system was getting the money for the Events2HVAC license. But Streamside Solutions helped out a bit on the pricing, and then the director of the church’s Communications Ministry offered to pay for the software.
“We have to be pretty careful with our dollars because they are other people’s money.” Hall said. “So we try to only implement stuff that is really going to benefit the whole church and the whole operation. But I really did feel like this was worthwhile, and our director of communications and I discussed it several times. He’s my new best friend.”
Other obstacles were more minor. Staff members had to adjust to the fact that if an event is not put into the calendar, the room will not have air conditioning. The custodian who lives on campus had to accept that he can no longer manually adjust the AutomatedLogic system because it is running off the calendar. And events had to be created in the calendar for spaces that are not normally considered when reserving rooms.
Hall explained, “I had to set up a few events in our calendar to run our offices and things like that because I just had them set up as an ongoing program in the AutomatedLogic programming…hallways and bathrooms and things you don’t really think about reserving rooms for. But it was not a problem.”
She was able to set up Events2HVAC herself, with some help from Brian Russell at Streamside Solutions and her HVAC representative. “They were excellent about communicating with each other and then getting it in a format that I could understand,” Hall said.
Though Hall was already scheduling individual rooms before the Events2HVAC implementation, she expects that the church will save energy because of the automation and the elimination of human error.
“This is crazy. Why can't these two things talk to each other? It turns out they can.” (Susan Hall)
“For example,” Hall said “our day school lets out in the summer, and I remember one summer I forgot to discontinue the programming for the classrooms until about the middle of July. So they had been running all summer on a school schedule. That kind of thing will stop happening because I just didn’t have time to get back to it and look through there and see if there was anything I needed to change.”
Remembering early conversations with the director of the Communications Ministry, Hall said she told him, “This is crazy. Why can’t these two things talk to each other?” adding, “It turns out they can.”
Hall said she would like to tell other churches with large campuses about Events2HVAC, emphasizing "The automation of it is well worth the cost."
Events2HVAC Integrated Systems:
EMS
AutomatedLogic WebCTRL® (AHU's, VAV's, FCU's)
About Events2HVAC™
Events2HVAC Event Automation Software (www.events2hvac.com) is designed to save your facility energy, labor, and money by integrating your facility's event/room reservation system directly to the room's environmental controls.
Lighting, door access, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning can all be turned on and off or adjusted automatically based on the scheduled events for that room.