Energy Audit Checklist

The base load is the one measurement on this document that reliably surprises people, and it is the reason the audit should start before the working day rather than during it. Every building has a floor to its consumption, the amount it draws when nobody is in it, and that floor is made up of things that genuinely must run and things that are running because a schedule was set during commissioning and never revisited. The useful property of the figure is that it is almost impossible to argue with. A building drawing a third or more of its peak demand at three in the morning is not an efficient building with a measurement problem; it is a building with plant running that nobody has asked about, and the walk that follows is simply a matter of finding out which plant. That is why the template asks for the reading to be taken in person rather than lifted from a graph. Half-hourly data averaged over a month hides the thing you are looking for, and a graph tells you the load exists without telling you which panel it is on. The second reason to start here is that it reorders the whole report. An audit that begins with the fabric produces recommendations about insulation and glazing, which are capital measures with long paybacks and a procurement process attached. An audit that begins with the base load produces recommendations about schedules, setpoints and overrides, which cost nothing, can be done the same week, and frequently save enough to pay for the audit several times over. Both sets of findings belong in the report. The order in which they appear determines whether anything happens.

Fifteen percent is a completely ordinary result for a first audit of a building nobody has been managing, and the number that matters more is the five. Nine thousand four hundred against a sixty one thousand eight hundred bill is the headline, and it is the right headline because a saving expressed on its own means nothing without the bill beside it. But the line that determines whether any of it happens is that five of the fourteen measures cost nothing: schedules revised to actual occupancy, setpoints and dead bands corrected, overrides taken out of hand, lighting controls that were fitted and never commissioned. Those five can be done in a week by people already on site, they need no procurement and no capital approval, and in most buildings they are worth more than the glazing. Starting the report with them is not a presentational choice; it is what makes the rest of the report credible, because a building that has already banked a saving this quarter listens differently to a proposal with a five year payback. The last line is the one most audits never produce. Six measures were implemented and seven thousand one hundred of saving was verified afterward, which is roughly three quarters of what was identified from those measures. Verified saving is what makes the next audit fundable, and the reason to agree the verification method before any work starts rather than after. Being fifteen percent above the benchmark is the prompt to act rather than a conclusion in itself, since benchmarks cover a wide range of buildings and this one may simply run longer hours. The plant most of these findings land on is covered by the HVAC maintenance checklist and the boiler maintenance checklist, and the wider condition survey that runs alongside an energy audit is the property condition assessment. For the background on how a commercial audit is scoped and what each audit level involves, there is a full guide to auditing a commercial building.

The difference between the two columns is almost entirely decided before anybody arrives at the building. An auditor who turns up without consumption data can only report what they can see, and what can be seen is biased heavily toward the visible: old lighting, tired glazing, obvious drafts, plant that looks its age. Those observations are not wrong, but they are unpriced, which means the report cannot rank them and the reader cannot act on them without commissioning further work. The same walk done with twelve months of bills in hand produces something different in kind, because every finding can be sized against a known total and the ones worth pursuing separate themselves immediately from the ones that merely look untidy. This is also what protects the audit from its most common failure, which is recommending a capital measure that is genuinely worthwhile and watching nothing happen for three years. Leading with the measures that cost nothing changes the economics of the conversation: they are implemented by people already employed, they show up on the next bill, and they establish that the audit produces results before anybody is asked to approve a budget. The last row is the one that compounds. Savings nobody measured afterward are the reason the following audit is harder to fund than this one, which is why the verification method is agreed before work starts rather than reconstructed afterward from a bill that has also been affected by the weather, occupancy and tariff. Energy as a single line inside a wider facilities scorecard is a different document, the facility management KPIs template, and the plant these findings land on is maintained with the chiller maintenance checklist.