Finding Top Cold Weather Faults With the Seasonal Dashboard

January 4, 2023

Our new Seasonal Dashboard highlights top cold weather faults to help facilities teams prepare equipment to run at peak performance during the dips in outdoor air temperatures this winter. By bringing all this information together in one place, it makes it easy to get ahead of potential catastrophic failures due to frozen pipes and coils, prepare for changing occupancies, and reduce hot/cold calls.

Seasonal Dashboard - Top 10 Cold Weather Faults

An Example:

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Using the Seasonal Dashboard, it’s simple to filter to all equipment with a specific cold weather fault over the selected time period to help prioritize the issues. We simply search for the fault type in the Notes Summary column of the Diagnostics Summary Table. 

In the example below, we checked for low mixed air temperatures in our Air Handlers. When the outside air temperature is below freezing, AHU coils could be subject to freezing and damage can occur on the coil tubes. Snow and/or freezing rain can also result in plugged filters or frozen dampers.

Clockworks identifies low mixed air temperatures and potential Air Handler freeze conditions with the AHU Economizer Diagnostic result mixed air temp lower than setpoint. In the example below, we can see the mixed air temp (green) is less than the mixed air temp setpt (light blue).

It also shows that the fresh air damper is stuck open.

As we introduced a few months ago in the Economizer email, the Outdoor Air Fraction vs. Damper Position scatter plot illustrates how the calculated air fraction correlates to the damper position. These percentages should be approximately equal and follow a linear diagonal line in the chart (left graph). For this example, we can see that the damper should be halfway open, but the outside air fraction is around 90% (right graph).

In cases where the Air Handlers do not have a mixed air temperature setpoint, Clockworks can identify potential Air Handler freeze conditions with the AHU Economizer Diagnostic result fresh air damper stuck open.

Have you checked your outside air dampers? 


Learn more about how building analytics software from Clockworks can help your organization reduce costs and achieve greater sustainability and technology innovation. On average, Fault Detection and Diagnostics users save 9% in energy costs. Request a demo today!

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