About

As a premier service provider, Limbach specializes in cost reduction and achieving sustainability goals for clients across diverse sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, culture, higher education, and life sciences. Leveraging its expertise in HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems, Limbach consistently delivers tailored solutions to meet the unique needs of its clientele.

Limbach’s Vision:

To uncover energy savings and reduce the carbon footprint for their clients through access to real-time insights.

Using Facilio’s Connected Buildings solution, Limbach aims to manage all the facilities and buildings of their clients in one centralized location, reducing operating costs and gaining access to comprehensive insights, helping them streamline operations and achieve sustainability goals in record time.

Challenges:

• The Lack of a single pane of glass view resulted in limited access to historical data and performance insights
• Absence of remote monitoring led to inconsistent tracking of energy, natural gas,and water usage
• There was no optimization of technician scheduling leading to inefficiencies in managing maintenance and repair tasks
• Process Inefficiencies arose due to lack of integration and data sharing across systems leading to a heavy reliance on manual processes such as data management in Excel sheets, etc.

The Solution:

A software-first approach to energy efficiency and end-to-end digital transformation

Facilio’s connected buildings platform was deployed across 4 sites spread over an expansive 1.3 million sq. ft of space and 813 assets, resulting in portfolio-wide visibility, optimized technician scheduling, real-time visibility on faults, and eventually bringing about a significant reduction in costs

Limbach has adopted two levels of Facilio’s decarbonization journey to achieve optimal performance across their portfolios

Level-1

• Utility bill analysis

Level-2

• Energy Analytics
• Fault detection and Diagnostics and Root cause analysis

360-degree O&M Insights:

Facilio’s platform was pivotal in empowering Limbach to gain a comprehensive view of their sites across diverse sectors. By seamlessly integrating the different equipment sensors and consolidating all the insights in a single interface, Limbach gained easy access to crucial data, enabling them to correlate the data easily for asset optimization, set point control, and energy-saving operations. This also allowed Limbach to provide new services to their clients, such as Rapid FDD, behavior management and tracking, vendor management, and space management, thus enhancing the building's performance and efficiency.

For example, Spaces, Floors, Buildings, etc., were created on the platform by mapping the associated HVAC equipment and sensors, providing Limbach with a granular view of the operations, thus helping them achieve peak building performance across its client’s portfolio

Energy usage optimization:

Facilio’s utility tracking module streamlined the management of energy, gas, and water usage by uploading historical bills and providing insights on consumption trends, irregularities, and cost analysis, enabling Limbach to make strategic and informed decisions.

Limbach was able to identify that the AHUs were heating and cooling at the same time and hence rectified the issue to reduce the energy consumption

Real-time analysis to boost building performance:

Facilio’s energy analytics empowered Limbach to optimize building performance, identify energy-saving opportunities, and reduce operational costs even during non-operational hours by providing real-time trend analysis,weather-based comparisons and valuable insights on energy consumption. BAS schedules were compared to real-time readings and modified to optimize system operations

Proactive Maintenance with Rapid Fault Detection & Diagnostics:

Facilio successfully implemented Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) with a set of over 300 rules and identified 4317 FDD alarms for real-time monitoring of building performance. This implementation facilitated timely alerts and tailored reports, empowering proactive maintenance measures at individual sites and ultimately optimizing operational efficiency. Facilio's FDD module goes beyond basic monitoring by incorporating Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and impact analysis, precisely identifying actual fault conditions and their impact on energy wastage and cost. Furthermore, the system recognizes equipment failures in violation of design parameters and identifies sensor faults across various portfolios. This comprehensive approach ensures a proactive and data-driven strategy for building performance optimization.

Through Facilio’s rapid FDD, Limbach could recognize the Cooling and Heating Setpoint Violations clearly, monitor air quality and temperature and pinpoint assets operating out of schedule and deviations from Building Management System (BMS) sequences.

Impact:

• Gained end-to-end visibility of operations
• Improved asset maintenance via remote monitoring
• First reports within just 45 days of project kickoff
• Identified recurring problems and helped prioritize Capital Planning initiatives
• Optimized technician scheduling for efficient maintenance and minimizing downtime
• Smooth and self reliant user experience