Lead the Way

‘One small change’ – not a new concept but what does it mean to you? Whether it’s the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ made famous by Team GB during the Olympics or even a pact with yourself to change a habit like taking the stairs in place of the lift, the common theme is that ‘small changes’ can have a big impact.

Just imagine that if all the buildings controlled by the BCIA Membership could have their energy consumption reduced by a few percent, the result of all of these ‘small changes’ would be massive.

Embracing innovation and change continue to pay-off in the dynamic building controls industry. We are constantly striving to improve energy efficiency in line with current and impending government regulations to ensure that our planet is both healthy and sustainable. You could say that with so much energy under our collective control, it is also our professional responsibility to look to increase efficiency and ‘lead the way’. Perhaps this is our Blue Planet ‘plastic bag’ moment?

It is abundantly clear that highly trained, smart engineers are using innovative and effective building controls to play a huge role in improving energy efficiency and at the same time, making buildings more comfortable for occupants. This is critical in ensuring the sector continues to grow and remains strong over the coming years.

This is a great opportunity and collectively we can all do even more to improve today’s sophisticated commercial buildings and share best practice so our ‘small changes’ make the big change that we wish to see.

We can only achieve this by sharing examples of good practice and our own actions which have resulted in lowering energy consumption or improving the wellbeing of building occupants.

It can be simple behaviour changes like checking that time schedules reflect the actual building usage or perhaps something more complicated such as changing the control strategy to change a chiller setpoint based on overall cooling demand. Simple or complicated, the list is endless. Some may take these examples as being standard practice with no need to ‘shout’ about it. But let’s be honest, sometimes we need a gentle reminder or a little nudge to always seek new methods to improve both control and energy efficiency. So, maybe don’t ‘shout’ about it but how about ‘sharing’ it to help build a collective culture of being proud of doing the right thing within and beyond our Association? By sharing examples of good practice, we can inspire and encourage others to do the same. Let’s not keep our energy saving measures to ourselves, let’s spread the word and motivate others to think about what they can or are already doing to conserve energy in their buildings.

So, my challenge to you reading this, is to share your own method(s) of saving energy in a building or in your work. Post it on Twitter, LinkedIn or your website with the hashtag #OneSmallChange and let’s see what we can learn from each other while collectively improving today’s commercial buildings. It’s over to you…

#OneSmallChange