Collier County Government’s K-12 School District

Collier County Government has 58 school properties under its stewardship in the state of Florida. The sub-tropical climate of the Gulf Coast region is challenging in-and-of-itself when managing a building’s environment and maintaining occupant comfort. Utilizing the Niagara Framework® provided critical data and alarming to better help manage energy usage, optimize efficiency, and reduce operating costs.

The school district depends on DX systems (direct expansion using refrigerant), which is used for the cooling and dehumidification of its buildings. Installing a centralized single-tool user interface energy management system was needed to better control air and water flow, sub-metering, sensors, and conserve energy.

Lynxspring’s JENEsys PC-8000 controllers and JENEsys Edge controllers along with an assortment of other brand-name controllers were installed seamlessly for data integration, custom UI development and analytics support. Lynxspring also ported the Niagara operating system to their programmable JENEsys VAV Edge controller also incorporated a myriad of control applications proving useful in this project build.

Challenge

Many proprietary manufacturer protocols and legacy systems needed to be integrated with the new functionality of advanced and more modern controls. This enabled one school campus’s chiller to communicate key data like energy usage with the school districts’ central Wide-Area Network (WAN). Connected data for 58 school buildings, +63,000 control points under Niagara management serving HVAC, lighting and many other control applications were implemented.

Solutions

This building integration project resulted in the successful deployment of the Niagara Framework as the standard operating system across all of its school campuses. The Collier County Government now has secured fast, reliable building performance and equipment performance, an easy user-friendly dashboard via HTML5, current cybersecurity defense and a competitive bid process.