AiTBMS reduced HVAC energy spend 18% in 90 days

The Challenge

The portfolio owner's facilities team knew energy costs were too high, but couldn't pinpoint the cause. Their legacy building automation system (BAS) collected data but surfaced it only as hourly rollups in a report that was reviewed, at best, weekly. Equipment faults were discovered reactively — typically after a tenant complaint or an elevated utility bill.

HVAC scheduling drift was a known problem: setpoints that had been optimized years ago during the original BAS commissioning were no longer reflecting actual occupancy patterns. Remote work had shifted occupancy curves significantly, but the BAS schedules hadn't been updated. Buildings were conditioning unoccupied floors during peak-rate hours and running systems through the night in low-occupancy configurations that hadn't been recalibrated in 36+ months.

• HVAC scheduling set to pre-pandemic occupancy patterns — never recalibrated
• Fault detection reactive: discovered via tenant complaints, not proactive monitoring
• BAS data surfaced only as weekly reports — no real-time anomaly visibility
• LL97 compliance benchmarking required but not yet implemented
• Full BMS replacement quoted at $1.8M+ across all 8 buildings — not approved

The Solution

Intelligent Group deployed AiTBMS as an analytics and fault-detection layer on top of the existing BAS infrastructure. AiTBMS connected to the BAS data stream via existing building network infrastructure — no field hardware swap, no controls replacement, no tenant disruption. The deployment across all 8 buildings was complete in 18 days.

AiTBMS ran continuous fault detection algorithms against the real-time BAS telemetry, flagging anomalies by dollar-weighted severity: each fault is ranked by its estimated monthly energy cost impact, not just its technical severity. Within the first week, AiTBMS surfaced 14 active HVAC faults across 6 of the 8 buildings — including three AHU economizer faults that had been running for an estimated 8 months and were contributing approximately $12,400/month in unnecessary conditioning cost.

• AiTBMS connected to existing BAS data stream via building LAN — no hardware swap
• All 8 buildings deployed in 18 days
• 14 active HVAC faults surfaced in first week, ranked by dollar impact
• Occupancy-adaptive schedule recommendations generated and implemented by facilities team
• LL97 compliance benchmarking dashboard deployed alongside fault detection
• Real-time energy spend dashboard with per-building and per-system breakdown

Results at 90 Days

The 18% reduction is measured against the 90-day pre-deployment energy baseline for HVAC systems. Total utility cost reduction is lower as non-HVAC loads are not managed by AiTBMS in this deployment phase.

In Their Words

What’s Next

Phase 2 extends AiTBMS to lighting and electrical systems across the 3 highest-energy buildings in the portfolio. Phase 3 implements automated setpoint adjustment recommendations — moving from facilities-team-implemented changes to AiTBMS-suggested, facilities-approved changes with a one-click approval workflow.

• Lighting and electrical fault detection across top-3 energy buildings
• One-click setpoint adjustment approval workflow
• Tenant sustainability reporting dashboard (ESG-ready exports)
• Predictive maintenance scheduling based on fault frequency trends