An early adopter of facility automation and direct digital control technologies, Notre Dame originally turned to ECS Midwest in 1978 to install an energy management system for 22 campus buildings with one central workstation. Since that first project, the company has continued to provide design, installation, renovation, and maintenance services to the University, expanding the initial control system network to 76 facilities and adding approximately three buildings each year.
To meet these diverse needs, ECS Midwest upgraded the client’s existing control system to support network communications and provided a user interface via standard web browser software. This put all building control systems directly on the University’s intranet network infrastructure, where the school could reap the benefits of local and wide-area networking.
As the project began, ECS Midwest worked with the client to evaluate emerging wide-area networking technologies and design the upgrade transition plan. The company then self performed each phase of the implementation. As each phase was completed, the client gained increasingly greater ability to monitor and adjust temperature sensors, occupancy schedules, equipment run times, and energy consumption from any of the University’s intranet-connected PCs, even those in off-campus locations. In addition, significantly clearer and easier to use graphics enabled the client to take maximum advantage of the system’s expanded flexibility and control features. This further increased facility management efficiency and helped to ensure a consistently optimum learning environment for students, faculty, and administrators.
Notre Dame University has grown from a three-building Indiana frontier mission site in 1842 to a world-renowned research university with 132 buildings covering more than 7-million square feet. Ranked as one of “America’s 100 Most Wired Colleges”, Notre Dame is regarded as one of the most technologically advanced universities in the country, maintaining superlative computer and communication technology standards.