A downtown Seattle high-rise at 50% occupancy still needs to maintain its entire footprint, but it doesn’t need to cool all of it. Most older HVAC systems can’t tell the difference, and the utility bill shows it.
I have been with Albireo Energy for 19 years. Fifteen of them were spent as a service manager in San Diego before I moved north to lead our Seattle office. Much of my work now is listening to what building owners are dealing with, and the gap between how their offices are occupied and how they are operated is wider than most of them realize.
Parts of Downtown Are Still Running 1950s Technology
Part of the problem is the age of the building stock. A good number of downtown Seattle buildings still run on pneumatic controls, which work on compressed air instead of electricity. Some have been in place since the 1950s, and very few companies still employ technicians trained to service them.
Those buildings are the strongest upgrade candidates in the city, and they sit in the toughest financial spot. An owner without tenants has no revenue to fund the work. That is the honest constraint in this market, and it explains why some of the projects that most need doing are the ones sitting still.
A Half-Empty Floor Still Gets Full-Service Air
Maintaining a workspace and conditioning it are separate jobs. Older systems cannot distinguish an occupied floor from an empty one, so they follow a fixed schedule and ventilate for the headcount the building was designed to hold. Holding an empty floor at 72 degrees for people who worked from home that day is money spent on nobody.
The industry term for this is “ghost occupancy,” when a building conditions space as if it were full when the actual headcount is a fraction of the design load.
What Occupancy-Aware Controls Actually Do
Pairing occupancy data with a time-of-day schedule is the core of occupancy awareness. An empty room does not need cooling, and a modern system knows the room is empty. The advantages are clear:
- Simple occupancy sensing: The sensor that turns on the lights when I walk into my office can also tell the air conditioning unit that someone is here.
- Load-aware sensing: Conference rooms use more sophisticated sensors that recognize a larger load and respond with more cooling, or colder air, to reach the setpoint faster.
- Morning warm-up and pre-cooling: The system brings the whole building partway to setpoint before anyone arrives.
There is a step between shutdown and startup, and most buildings skip it. An office left alone overnight drifts well off setpoint, and dragging the temperature back to 72 degrees first thing is an expensive way to start a day. Pre-cooling the building to 75 degrees between 6 and 7 a.m. gives every office a head start.
On a slow Tuesday, the building conditions the floors with people on them. On a busy Thursday, the packed conference rooms cool down sooner.
Running Less Also Means Replacing Less
Owners sometimes worry that cycling equipment down is hard on it. My experience runs the other way. Shutting a system off or slowing it substantially puts less wear on it, which extends the life of the mechanical equipment you already own.
A modern control system also gives you a clear view of a building’s shared heating and cooling. If an air handling unit is supposed to deliver 50-degree air and it is delivering 70, the system flags the deviation and points to the cause. Without that, someone walks the building and traces the problem manually. Catching deviations early cuts downtime and sometimes prevents a failure outright.
Savings Fade Without Maintenance
A building is a living thing. Its walls contain a conglomeration of coordinating systems that keep the smaller constituent organisms coursing through it in a state of functional and perpetual stasis. But setpoint can drift as small changes are made to that system on a daily basis. Those small changes stack up until the system has drifted away from the logic under which it was originally commissioned, and modern BAS systems are there to bring it back into balance.
Security is the other reason to maintain overarching building systems. A control system is a computer network, and the major manufacturers now release updates annually instead of every few years.
Seattle’s Emissions Deadlines
Seattle’s Building Emissions Performance Standard became law in December 2023 and covers non-residential and multifamily buildings above 20,000 square feet. Reporting requirements begin in 2027 for the largest buildings and phase in through 2030. Greenhouse gas intensity targets apply between 2031 and 2035, with penalties reaching $10 per square foot per five-year cycle for non-residential buildings that miss them.
Seattle City Light reports typical savings of 10% to 15% from a major HVAC controls upgrade, and its commercial controls incentive covers up to 70% of installed cost for qualifying buildings with at least 50,000 square feet of conditioned space.
Find Out How Your Building Is Performing Today
Most buildings we look at are running sequences somebody wrote years ago for an occupancy pattern that no longer exists. Contact Albireo Energy’s Seattle team to discuss a controls assessment for your property.
Pablo Cordon is Vice President and General Manager of Albireo Energy’s Seattle Division. He has spent 19 years with the company, including 15 years as a service manager in San Diego and a term as VP and General Manager of the San Diego office.
