Why understand comfort and energy?
The energy you use influences your comfort, and vice versa, your comfort needs to influence the way you use energy. Monitoring what your comfort needs are, and the comfort needs of others, and how your school makes use of energy, is important to understand what changes you and your school can make. To monitor your comfort and energy use, you need to track the behaviour overtime of the variables in your environment.
What are the variables of the environment?
With Greengage, you will get to monitor the behaviour of two types of variables: indoor climate variables and energy variables. Greengage gives them each a name and a character to relate to.
Indoor climate variables
These variables describe how comfortable the physical area in your school is, for example, the indoor climate of a classroom or the canteen. They describe five different behaviours: how warm or cold is a room (temperature), how humid or dry is a room (humidity), how stuffy or fresh is the air in the room (CO2), how noisy or quiet is the room (sound) and how light or dark is the room (light). Greengage shows you their behaviour and the ranges in which the behaviour is comfortable.
Energy use
Your school uses several types of energies, electricity, water, and gas to allow the school building functioning and keeping the classrooms comfortable with regards to lighting, heating and cooling, ventilation, cooking, cleaning, etc. In addition, Greengage, depending on the technical capacity, helps you track the use of electricity in the building.
How does this work in Greengage?
Greengage offers you diverse ways to monitor the behaviour of the variables:
- real time: you can see the real time behaviour of the indoor climate variables: what is the temperature right now in a classroom?
- historical: you can check average (or accumulative) behaviour of the variables across time: what was the average temperature of a classroom last week? How much electricity did we use last month?
- via myths: these Q&As show you data from variables to contrast your comfort experience with facts: for example, you may think that mornings are colder than afternoons and the data shows you that in average mornings have been only 1 degree lower than in the afternoons so far in the current season.
