Your tenant in the eastern wing is chronically cold. You’re fighting an uphill battle for safety as your tenant’s employees bring personal heaters into the space.  In the western wing, however, your tenant’s employees can’t get cool enough. They complain of high energy bills while swearing the humidity will lead to mold problems. Uncomfortable tenants are more than a headache. They are a threat to your bottom line. Thermal comfort can impact your tenants’ desire to renew their leases. Additionally, a commercial property with low thermal comfort may indicate inefficiencies in its climate controls or building envelope. High turnover and an inefficient building will adversely affect your bottom line. Thermal Comfort + Your Bottom Line The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers defines thermal comfort as the condition of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment. It is subjectively assessed by using the Comfort Scale or Thermal Index, both of which evaluate temperature, humidity, air velocity, and radiant temperature. As comfort is subjective, a commercial building’s thermal comfort ranking will vary from person to person. Health and Safety Executive recognizes an international standard which suggests that a building has “reasonable comfort” when at least 80 percent of its occupants are thermally comfortable. Improving Thermal Comfort in Commercial Properties There are three ways to notably improve tenant comfort and protect your investment: 1. Identify and Fix Leaks Address leaks in the building envelope. Contact a contractor to identify areas where your heating and cooling efforts are defeated by oversights in construction or maintenance. Resealing windows and adding weather stripping to doors, for example, are two quick fixes for drafts. Leakage significantly decreases the energetic efficiency of an HVAC system. As a result, the HVAC system may be working overtime to regulate indoor conditions. Have your units...

With the ability to collect, analyze and communicate real-time energy information, Pulse Energy adds the power of data to Yardi Energy arsenal. The Power of Data Over the last few years, Jeff Rambharack and the Pulse Energy team have worked to collect data on over a million businesses throughout the US and Canada. That data drives the company’s overall approach and helps provide Pulse clients with strategies tailored to their unique challenges. The company works with utilities and individual businesses, focusing on solutions specifically for different industry segments. “We provide personalized messaging for individual businesses,” explains Rambharack. “We support over 130 different verticals for businesses segments, and we provide personal messaging within each segment. We recognize that every business is different, and we work to identify sources of energy consumption and provide targeted recommendations layered on top of our in-depth analytics we’ve developed to analyze each business’s energy consumption.” Rambharack believes the biggest benefit of this data aggregation is that it allows an energy usage analysis at every level of a company’s organization. By being able to provide personalized insights about of those levels of aggregation, Pulse clients can pursue more effective energy management policies and procedures to reduce energy waste and improve energy efficiency. “Just being able to provide insights and say ‘Hey, you should go look at building X, because we think it has some efficiency problems,’ is so valuable to our clients,” says Rambharack. “Maybe we discover that they are leaving their systems on at night or running their AC and heating simultaneously. Our analytics and extensive database help us detect these sorts of oversights and provide valuable energy consumption insight to our customers.” Tracking Usage against the Baseline One of the most valuable tools for energy management involves developing an accurate...

Editor’s note: The following piece and accompanying graphics are re-published with permission from Home Energy Magazine. Behavioral recommendations, or tips, are an integral piece of many energy efficiency programs, ranging from marketing materials (e.g., brochures) to in-home audits, to Home and Business Energy Reports (such as the report shown below). Though information is known to be a critical component of effective interventions, it is important to consider human motivations and needs for this to be effective. This article synthesizes findings from a series of empirical research conducted by See Change Institute and Yardi (formerly Pulse) Energy’s Business Energy Report (BER) program[1]. By breaking apart the tips from the energy report (sample below) and breaking down the components of those tips even further, we were able to test the impact of variations of different components of tips, with the goal of optimizing messaging to incite pro-efficiency behavior in BER recipients[2]. In synthesizing these findings, we identified five key insights on tip content, form, structure, and imaging, or “Tips for Tips”.     1. Put People in Pictures First, we tested the impact of having people in images above the tips – one tip had a picture of equipment, the other included someone actually engaging in the behavior being promoted. We found that tips with an image of a person engaging in the action were rated significantly higher in terms of behavioral intention (that is, how much someone self­-reports intention to complete the recommended action).We recommend considering images that do include people, especially people engaging in the recommended action. 2. Tell People What to Do Next, we tested the difference between a “subject title” (e.g., “Ceiling Fans”) and an “action title” (e.g.,”Use fans more & A/C less”). We found that using an action title led people...