Auckland War Memorial Museum's sustainability journey

Auckland War Memorial Museum is one of New Zealand’s premier tourist attractions, with over 850,000 visitors each year. Established in 1852, the facility consists of a war memorial, heritage library, a vast collection of Maori and Pacific artefacts and an encyclopaedic collection, totalling approximately 3.5 million pieces. It also attracts regular international exhibitions and provides educational services to over 60,000 school children annually.

The museum has a longstanding relationship with Honeywell Building Solutions (HBS), spanning close to a decade, through the operation of HBS’s Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI). EBI is a building management system that helps organisations to improve efficiency and reduce energy and operational costs by simplifying set-up, scheduling and control.

When a significant upgrade to Auckland Museum took place in 2009, operations staff decided to focus on improving the building’s collection environment as well as its energy performance to align with and support Auckland Council’s wider environmental strategies.

Part of this process involved an upgrade to the latest version of EBI, as well as working closely with HBS to undertake an audit of current operations. A number of recommendations were outlined as a result of this, and in 2011 the museum began to address those recommendations, which included a trial to change the operation of its heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) system. This trial saw a level of improvement that has resulted in it being rolled out across the entire facility.

As part of this change to the HVAC, operations relaxed the temperature set points within Auckland Museum. Where the building would have previously been operating at as close to 22°C as possible, the new approach expanded this to a scope of anywhere between 20 and 23°C. Humidity controls were also significantly widened. With these changes, any time the facility was within the new settings meant that very little energy was consumed. “Relaxing your controls by even one degree Celsius for temperature or a few per cent for humidity levels can have a dramatic flow-on effect for energy consumption,” said Karl Satchell, sustainability engineer, Auckland Museum.

EBI integrates with Auckland Museum’s HVAC system, sewerage and wastewater alarms, and electricity, natural gas and water meters for easy management. EBI’s powerful engine allows the museum’s operators to control all of this equipment from a single access point, making tuning of the systems simple. It also allows operators to monitor, report and trend energy consumption. A user-friendly interface provides the flexibility needed for when adjustments are made for continual improvement.

“It has been a three-year collaboration with Honeywell Building Solutions to get to where we are today,” Satchell said. “As a result, we have seen a 50% reduction in our carbon footprint in just three years, a majority of this directly from the innovative software enhancements that were developed. This equates to approximately a NZD$350,000 reduction in annual energy costs. And that’s just through energy-efficiency improvements - there have also been a number of financial savings in maintenance and other areas.”

While the approach of constant tuning and adjustment over the past few years has been relatively smooth, one challenge the museum did face was ensuring its conservators accepted the climate changes it was making. However, the measurement and visualisation functionality of EBI made it simple for facility managers to be transparent in their actions and keep the conservators involved throughout the process. In fact, the changes have led to an improved housing environment for the museum’s collection. “We designed the software in a way so that during the day there wasn’t too much change, but after hours there was dramatic change, which was possible due to no visitors or staff being in the facility,” said Satchell. “Our first priority was to improve the collection environment and secondary was the energy improvements. Honeywell’s software enabled us to do that.”

“For Auckland Museum, its approach has been about widening its comfort guidelines until it finds the right balance between energy consumption and user comfort,” said Steve White, account manager, Honeywell Building Solutions. “While we work with the facility on an ongoing basis to help identify new methods for improving operations, we’ve also set up the system so that it can run seamlessly in the background with little intervention needed.”

“The success we have seen has been about partnership,” said Satchell. “My advice to any organisation embarking on a sustainability overhaul is to build a relationship with your supplier, because through ongoing collaboration real results will be seen.”