News
Campus-wide Building Dashboard® featured in Bowdoin Campus News, Bowdoin Orient
February 1, 2010
Brunswick, ME - Bowdoin Campus News and The Bowdoin Orient cover the campus-wide installation of Building Dashboard®, which allows students, faculty, staff and residents to view and compare real-time electricity consumption across 34 buildings. From the articles:
On a cold day recently, the energy used in Maine Hall was equivalent to that needed to cook 36 hamburgers. Or drive a car 171 miles. Or for those who prefer their measurements in cold hard cash, about $11.58.
... "With year-to-year data, we'll be able to dig down, in user-selectable intervals, to identify spikes in electricity use and locate mechanical problems that might otherwise go undetected," says Payson.
"[Building] Dashboard empowers building occupants to make better decisions for resource use and makes energy use really visible, which engages students, faculty and staff, and helps them better understand the ramifications."
[Coordinator for a Sustainable Bowdoin Keisha] Payson says research suggests that the more immediate the feedback on electricity use, the more effective it is in motivating people to change their consumption habits, adding that the Dashboard will add a new dynamic to campus energy conservation contests.
... "We expect the Building Dashboard system installed throughout Bowdoin's campus to be a very positive contribution to their overall electricity reduction and sustainability goals, which will help motivate their students and community to adopt conservation behaviors," says Lucid Design Group's Andrew deCoriolis.
"In conjunction with Bowdoin's energy-efficiency projects, we expect Building Dashboard to catalyze conservation efforts and help decrease energy use 10 to 50 percent."
Read the full Bowdoin Campus News article online >>
... "The meter readings were basically an Excel spreadsheet for every different month. The data was just numbers; it never really told a story," said Keisha Payson, [Coordinator for a Sustainable Bowdoin.] "If we suddenly start using a lot more [energy], it wasn't necessarily obvious. If we could come up with a way to graph it, it would become a lot more interesting."
... "[Lucid's Building Dashboard] provides a very easy-to-use interface, but also has the behind-the-scenes capabilities for Facilities to identify potential issues we might be having that previously might have gone unnoticed for months or years," said Payson. "If a piece of equipment starts to malfunction, we'll catch onto that right away."
Read The Bowdoin Orient article online >>
About Lucid
Founded in 2004, Lucid Design Group, Inc. ("Lucid") is a privately held cleantech software company and a pioneer in providing real-time information feedback to teach, inspire behavior change and save energy and water resources in buildings. Over the past seven years, Lucid's team has endeavored to make resource use visible, accessible and engaging so that building occupants have the data visualization and communication tools to manage and reduce their consumption.
Today, tens of thousands of people live and work in schools, companies, community and commercial buildings and homes enhanced by Lucid's web-based Building Dashboard® technology. Now in its fourth generation, the intuitive Building Dashboard® user interface allows occupants to connect personal electricity, water and natural gas consumption with the actions and events that take place within buildings.
