John Lord // Fairfax County Public Schools

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Tell us about yourself.

My name is John Lord and I’m the energy management coordinator for Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. We have 180,000 students and 28 million buildings and 25,000 full time employees. So, it’s a pretty good sized school division.

What’s your experience like with EnergyCAP?

I have worked for three different school divisions and have used EnergyCAP since 2003. And so that means that we’re in 20 years of using EnergyCAP. I actually used it before it was called EnergyCAP. In the very first school division I worked in, all they had been doing prior to putting Energy Cap in place was some accounting person was just paying the bills. It was just, uh, a business practice of here comes the bill, here goes the payment. So EnergyCAP really revolutionized that. We looked at the data, we looked at what we were using it for, and it has been in place in both of the other school divisions where I work.

How does EnergyCAP give you data to help you find savings?

When you begin setting up your database, or even if you have a mature program and you haven’t done it in a while, you really want to check and see are you paying for meters that belong to you. And, uh, each of the three instances where I’ve worked for a school division, we have found meters that didn’t belong to us. We looked and saw that a building was using way more water than we expected it to. There was a pipe that had broken, and we had about 3ft of water in the crawl space. And we were using about a million gallons a quarter extra water that we didn’t need, saving about $45,000 every three months from now on, on forever forward. So it’s not nothing. You can really use EnergyCAP to find stuff.

What advice would you give to others just starting out with EnergyCAP?

When I first started out, I knew nothing about energy. But if I had to set it up on my own, I would really want to know about how to set up a database. I would want to know what’s the structure, and I would want to not build in mistakes that I would regret having in the database later. Just don’t try to learn it all at once. Don’t try to do everything all at one time. Just get the things that are the fundamentals squared away. Then once you know that, then you can always expand your knowledge and expand your use of EnergyCAP.

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