Beginning in September 2019, McKinstry engaged with Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) through its funding partner to investigate energy efficiency opportunities through retrocommissioning and facility condition assessment. HCPS is a top-10 sized school district in the country serving over 200,000 students across 28M square feet of building space. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, methods and project objectives to complete this work shifted dramatically. Pivoting to remote investigation methods while still grounding retrocommissioning findings in the truth found in mechanical rooms and classrooms proved difficult, but led to workflow breakthroughs. Reopening schools in the Fall of 2020 that had been shut down for 6 months required incredible effort and coordination between McKinstry and HCPS to ensure proper cooling and ventilation in nearly 10,000 classrooms. Ongoing efforts to promote indoor environmental quality while achieving the District’s energy efficiency goals require our teams to evaluate tradeoffs and generate creative solutions while utilizing as much data and automation as possible. This presentation will be shared as a case study from 2 perspectives: McKinstry as a service provider and HCPS operations staff.

Learning Objectives:

1. Articulate differences in project objectives from a contractor and client point of view.
2. Describe the specific challenges to implementing RCx and MBCx on a large scale.
3. Identify tradeoffs between energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality in schools.
4. Apply remote-first principles to investigative methods in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.