Hartford medical center gets energy oversight

Hartford, Conn. — Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, a 617-bed acute care, teaching hospital, has awarded a contract to utiliVisor for energy monitoring services.

Located in Hartford, Connecticut, Saint Francis is New England’s largest Catholic hospital, with five centers of excellence focused on women’s and children’s services, oncology, cardiology, orthopedics and rehabilitation.

Under its contract, utiliVisor will provide continuous energy oversight for the hospital’s central energy plant, which includes three steam boilers, four electric chillers, a steam absorption chiller, and a plate and frame heat exchanger plus ancillaries.  The boilers are controlled by a Preferred Instruments control system and the chiller plant is controlled by an Alerton building automation system.

“The installation of the utiliVisor monitoring equipment will provide Saint Francis with greater control over its energy consumption and its utility bills,” said Bob Falaguerra, Vice President, Facilities, Support Services and Construction at Saint Francis. “This is part of our ongoing strategy to reduce costs while maintaining the highest level of patient care.”
utiliVisor will install meters to measure all critical energy inputs and outputs from each piece of equipment in order to identify operating efficiencies.  Data will be collected through the Alerton system and transmitted every five minutes to the web.  utiliVisor’s energy experts will analyze the data to determine the most efficient operating sequence and will provide ongoing performance recommendations and technical support to hospital operations staff.

“We estimate that Saint Francis will realize almost $200,000 in annual cost savings from the monitoring and optimization of its central plant,” explained Tim Angerame, Director at utiliVisor.

As part of its program utiliVisor will also seek approximately $75,000 in incentives from the Connecticut Energy Efficiency Fund on behalf of the hospital; potential retro-commissioning incentives may be available through the same fund as well.