Energy Savings Project: Portland Public Schools

MacDonald-Miller began working with Portland Public Schools (PPS) in 2015, commencing with Da Vinci Middle School. The first project was a small controls retrofit that entailed replacing antiquated motors and doing VFD upgrades. We also replaced the existing building automation system with a non-proprietary Honeywell WEBS DDC system.

As that project was completed, PPS was working on a master specification that involved moving their existing proprietary control system to an open source non-proprietary Honeywell system. The benefits of switching to a JACE Tridium open platform were the integration capabilities along with multi-vendor selling and support, which would give them flexibility and quicker response time.

For example, instead of being locked into working with one vendor, they could request multiple qualified Honeywell contractors for bids which result in immediate support for the service needs.

Since then, MacMiller has been fortunate enough to work on other high-profile schools in the bond modernization program. Faubion and Grant High School (a 300,000 SF major renovation) are excellent examples of completely modernizing the schools’ systems and maximizing the life-cycle costs of those buildings. MacMiller is the control system installation provider and system integrator for these school projects. While these advancements are inherently valuable, more importantly we are giving the community a high-performance building automaton system that maintains student comfort and safety.

Read more about this project in the Oregon Business Magazine.

Categories: General

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