Raytown Puts Children First in All They Do
Raytown, Missouri is a suburb of Kansas City and supports eighteen schools. Their guiding principle is “we put children first in all we do.” The school district's number one goal is to meet or exceed student academic growth performance. Yet there was something amiss in their ability to focus the children on their studies...
Challenge
In 2012, Michael Richardson, the director of buildings and grounds for the school district, had a problem that was disrupting the ability to achieve the goals of the students. The science wing of one of the middle schools was getting complaints that it was too hot or too cold in the classrooms, disrupting the students' ability to concentrate and learn. The building was considered fairly new (built in 1990), but the zone control system had
never worked correctly since the HVAC contractor had installed it. The school board approved a plan to replace this system at a cost of $40,000 over a period of 3 years. On that day Michael realized he needed to do something and do it fast.
Solution
Michael contacted Jerry Drew of Network Thermostat (NetX) and the NetX team jumped into action to assess the situation. They had seen similar circumstances and were convinced that the HVAC units were not to blame. And they were right: Jerry and the NetX team reported back to the Raytown schools the great news: they didn’t need to replace their rooftop HVAC units to solve the problem. The units were functioning properly. What wasn't working was the control of the units. To solve their problem - and save a huge repair bill - they simply needed to be able to control the units. This was huge: Richardson came to realize, with the help of NetX, that the entire solution was outside of ventilation. They worked together to put a plan in place: instead of controlling the vents, the answer was to control the heating and air conditioning systems themselves. A simple solution to a complex problem! Word spread and NetX was called in to help additional school districts with similar problems. For example, NetX was also implemented in the Cameron, Ohio school district who was having a similar problem. The results were nothing short of spectacular for both Raytown and Cameron.
Results
The installation of NetX at Raytown was easy, fast and inexpensive: taking only two days with two technicians to get the job done. The system now averages the readings from multiple rooms and turns on the heat or cool air as needed. The programming flexibility is useful for the school, where there are many after-hours events and the temperature varies throughout the day. Raytown reports that this flexibility resulted in an annual energy savings of 20%, and they were able to avoid the $40,000 repair, spending only 10% of this repair cost to fix the problem and take control of the HVAC management.