Four Syracuse University students have saved the university more than $12,000 a year through an analysis of the school’s energy usage.

Last year, four SU students working for the Industrial Assessment Center, a group funded by the Department of Energy, were tasked with designing a project that would help the university cut back on energy consumption and increase efficiency. The group, consisting of three undergraduate students and one graduate student decided to investigate the overheating of Maxwell Hall.

Seniors Enrica Galasso and Mark Seibel, as well as class of 2014 alumni Jillian Burgoyne and Ryan Milcarek contacted the SU’s Energy Systems and Sustainability Management group to see what would be a project, and the group pointed the students in the direction of the building overheating.

“Everyone when they think of sustainability they think, ‘Let’s just go put in some solar panels,’ but if we are overheating our buildings or not using our equipment effectively, we’re going to waste a lot of energy that way,” said Milcarek, who has since moved on from the IAS. “If we could cut down on all that, we could save much more than we could potentially save with solar panels.”

Most buildings should be between 68 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit in order for most people to be comfortable. The temperatures in Maxwell were consistently between 78 and 80. Once the group had found the problem, they set out to identify why the building was overheating, Burgoyne said.

The project started in December 2013, and the report was due in March 2014, giving the team about three months to identify what was causing the problem and make a recommendation to the university.

The team first looked at the air handler units, which are supposed to cycle heat throughout the building using steam. However, the group found that the steam traps were broken and were wasting a fair amount of steam. Also, this problem caused the air handlers to constantly heat the building.

The group then took aim at the steam radiators in Maxwell, which is the main way the building is heated, Milcarek said. They found that the temperatures in the radiators were surprisingly low. This was also caused by faulty steam traps, which were allowing steam to pass through to the exhaust line without extracting maximum heat. Therefore, the building was constantly overheated in a very inefficient manner.

The team surveyed 21 of the radiators in the building, and hypothesized that 35 percent had failed. Over the summer, the university brought in a professional team to finish the work, said Energy Conservation Manager Emily Greeno. They found that 21.7 percent of the steam traps were defective. The professional team was able to fix the deficiencies, and save the university 526,822 pounds of steam and $12,900 annually, Milcarek said.

For their efforts, the students finished first place in Greenovate NYS, a student competition open to graduates and undergraduates, which is helping to develop innovative solutions to benefit the environment. SU won the student competition even though only one of the four students was a graduate at the time.

“This was an opportunity in a very short period of time to see if everything that we had learned could actually make a difference, and it did,” said Milcarek. “It shows that as a university we have students that are very capable and ready to go into the workforce.”

As for extending the project to other buildings on campus, Burgoyne said that is entirely possible. However, it is definitely easier said than done. Many of the older buildings on campus would be incredibly difficult to fix, and the dorms are constantly occupied making it difficult to find time to complete the project.

“Each potential building presents a new challenge, but that is the fun of the projects — learning how to adapt and work with different issues that present themselves,” Burgoyne said.

Published on March 18, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Joe: jpleonar@syr.edu