Is Energy Use Reduction Through Informed Room Selection Possible?
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Hello,
I am a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying environmental sustainability, and I'm working on a project that focuses on the student room selection process for school housing. I'm specifically interested in the sort of information that is made available to potential residents when they're choosing a room.
Obviously the rooms are not all the same, but neither are the residents. So, some individuals might be drawn to certain predilections of a given space, while others might have aversions to those same features. Some people are night owls who like their living spaces to be darker, others want to wake up with the sun. Some people find that they're always cold, others are too warm even in the winter. Similarly, some rooms are bright at dawn, some never get direct sunlight, some are above server rooms and tend to be hot, and some are hard to heat because they're north-facing rooms above archways.
My point is that greater student satisfaction with room assignments could potentially be accompanied by energy savings through making certain details of rooms available to residents when they are selecting their future living spaces.
I certainly don't want to take up too much of your time, but I would greatly appreciate any insight you could give me into the details your school provides about the differences between rooms and the particular characteristics of individual spaces. If you provide any information of the sort I mentioned above, I'd be very interested to know about what data you share and how you do it.
Thank you for your time,
Joel Mintzer
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Joel,
This is an interesting idea.
Here at Skidmore we don't offer much information by each room or type of room in buildings for our residence halls that I am aware of, but there seems to be more information about some of our apartments on campus, maybe because they are newer and more uniform across each building, but I'm not sure. I think mainly it is just a capacity issue in trying to have someone go around and do an inventory of each room or each floor or however it would be grouped and then making that available somehow easily in a spreadsheet or database. It seems mainly they just provide the number of students that live in a room or apartment, how it is laid out as far as apartment setup or suites in res halls, furnished or not, safety issues like locks, where laundry is available, etc. They don't really have information from a sustainability perspective or energy perspective as far as things like what direction it faces, lighting as a part of the room draw website but on another site about each building you can find information about windows. It also doesn't seem to be in a database system that is accessible for students, although I don't understand it well enough right to know if that happens when they actually do their room draw or not, but if it isn't in a computer program of some sort then it makes it hard to offer that information easily and update it. Here is the site for selecting rooms: http://www.skidmore.edu/reslife/roomselection.php. Then there is more specific information by building here: http://www.skidmore.edu/reslife/residence-halls.php. If you click on one building it does provide information about window size and what is available in rooms.
We did, however, just take on a new scheduling system online that we can all use to reserve rooms on campus for academic spaces, auditoriums, meeting rooms, etc...and that system provides photos of the rooms and equipment in the room, etc., as a part of the reservation process. It is really nice. So I could imagine that a system like that could also achieve this purpose if it was decided that it made sense.
But, probably most campuses do not combine those two things, although I could be wrong. It seems like housing selection happens in one department or silo and then room reservations for academic or co-curricular meetings or classes happens in a separate system (or 3 different systems for class/registrar, housing for residential life, and then space reservations for co-curricular/meetings). I think in most cases class space registration and the meeting/co-curricular space registration has to be linked so that people know when the classroom spaces are available for other meetings outside of classes. So your point makes me realize that in some ways it might make sense for more of these things to be combined, but I'm not sure of what all the logistics of that are or challenges. Housing registration takes place all at once over a few weeks once a year, and then maybe another smaller version of that before spring semester as well, so it is just really different in terms of the needs and the load on the system within a short period of time as compared to space registration more generally.
I had a student work with me a couple of years ago who was thinking about how energy data by building, if accessible or in a building management system, could be correlated with things like temperature data, weather patterns, classes, etc., but student if possible to do some computer modeling to better understand what correlations existed or patterns emerged that could help in energy management decision-making or changing processes such as you are talking about. I do think there is a lot of interesting work here that people are probably already working on that would be very interesting!
Thanks for posing the question - it is an interesting one!
Riley Neugebauer
Sustainability Coordinator
Skidmore College