Kevin Gilbraith has the job of maintaining all the buildings in the Municipality of Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows in his capacity as facilities operations manager for Parks and Leisure Services. Kevin's job involves, amongst other things, being responsible for safety and for energy costs.

Earthquake safety is a continuing concern in the area and Kevin was particularly worried about the security of gas lines in the event of seismic disturbance.

Working with a local company, GPSI, he installed systems which monitored the integrity of gas lines via a series of methane sensors mounted at intervals along the pipes. In the event of a leak, an actuator system would automatically close off the gas valve at the supply.

It occurred to Kevin that, having already installed the monitoring system, he could extend it to monitor energy usage.

Recently he had installed high efficiency lighting in the operations centre only to find that reduced electricity use came at the expense of increased gas load for heating.

Initial payback analyses did not take that into account and obviously a more comprehensive analysis was required. For this Kevin needed detailed data and the gas safety monitoring system could be extended to provide that.

Working with GPSI, Kevin installed CO2 and temperature sensors to allow the ventilation system to work on demand. If both temperature and CO2 levels were within limits, no additional heating was provided and no outside air drawn in. Kevin also added occupancy sensors so that lighting would switch on and off automatically.

Now Kevin had accurate automatic control of the main energy users in the building coupled with an ability to monitor usage on a continual basis. Through detailed monitoring, he was able to cut the hours of usage to a minimum. And the savings started to roll in.

Analysis of gas usage since the monitoring and control systems were installed showed:

On the basis of these substantial economies, plans are in place to install similar systems into Pitt Meadows Family Recreation Centre and Maple Ridge Leisure Centre.