Small business owners have unique challenges that make investing in their facilities and energy projects seem extraneous. Capital, time, and manpower often limit priorities to core business goals leaving facility maintenance and repairs to be completed retroactively. While these projects generally do require some initial investment, they result in greater savings over time.
Larger enterprises have the capital and manpower to sign and manage preventative maintenance contracts. Outsourced contractors ensure equipment is running optimally keeping energy costs low and repair costs minimal. These contracts make sense for large enterprises, but are not as feasible for small businesses leaving owners in-the-dark. The lack of knowledge into a facility’s health leads to increasing energy costs, and a capital black-hole when a location needs to be shut down for costly equipment repairs.
GridPoint’s new Mobile 3.0 features bring energy and facility management opportunities to small businesses by reducing complexity of the solution and delivering it in an easily accessible way. These on-the-go tools visualize site issues and patterns, and indicate when action should be taken to avoid negative impacts on a business.
Jane Smith started a new quick-serve restaurant last year with three locations. She is passionate about making it big in the food service industry by creating one-of-a-kind, healthy food recipes and a friendly ambience. Being a small business owner is overwhelming as she must manage her staff, food quality, and costs all while providing the best possible customer experience. She is good at managing core operations and can control most costs, but she has noticed her energy bills increasing and doesn’t know why.
Here are a few ways Mobile 3.0 features can support Jane’s restaurants and keep her facilities and energy optimized:
HVAC Health
Like most restaurant owners, Jane has no idea how efficient her HVAC units are – she expects them to cool when it’s hot and heat when it’s cold. No one on her management team would know if a unit was malfunctioning until it ultimately breaks down, resulting in uncomfortable customers.
GridPoint’s system monitors and analyzes HVAC performance and can indicate when a unit is not performing well. The Mobile HVAC Health tool details each individual unit, and shows which ones are functioning correctly and which ones are declining in performance. Now she can proactively call an HVAC technician and have better control over her maintenance and repair expenses.
Comfort Control & Override Management
Jane realizes that adjusting her temperature to more moderate set-points can make a large impact on her energy bill, but she’s not willing to sacrifice customer comfort for those savings.
GridPoint’s comfort control and override features enable her to set multiple setpoint schedules for each HVAC unit to maximize savings. For instance, during the summer she could automate her temperature in the dining room to go up 3 degrees during slow hours, while keeping the kitchen cool for employees, and have the dining temperature return to normal during the lunch rush. If by chance she notices more customers than usual during an off-time, she can open her mobile app and immediately override the set-point.
Energy Dashboard
Jane’s mobile energy dashboard details how much energy is being consumed by individual appliances. She can focus energy efforts on the highest consumers for the greatest impact of controlling her energy bill. The dashboard also shows the peak load of her building and which appliances are creating the peak demand. She can use this to create a strategy to reduce the costly demand charges on her bills.
GridPoint strives to be the best in the world at collecting energy-related data and making it actionable for our customers. We do this by continuing to develop products and features with three goals in mind; integration, automation, and simplification. Our latest mobile release, 3.0, is designed to support the goal that makes our customers’ lives easier – simplification. This is GridPoint’s most feature-packed release to-date, and enables our customers to do so much more on-the-go. For more information, or to view a demo video visit http://www.gridpoint.com/mobile/, or contact GridPoint using the form below.
Deepak Budhiraja
VP, Product Management