The University of Prince Edward Island has released campus-wide guidelines on energy use in an attempt to lower its electricity costs.
Dave Taylor, the manager of UPEI's sustainability and energy management office, said the university has spent about $5 million in the past year on electricity and heat.
As part of the new guidelines, the energy office has instituted temperature benchmarks for campus buildings.
"We had large temperature fluctuations as you moved either from building to building or room to room," Taylor told CBC News on Wednesday.
Thermostats on campus will all be set at 20 C in the winter and 25 C in the summer when the rooms are occupied.
'Comfortable' temperatures
During the winter, when buildings are unoccupied at night, during weekends and vacations or other times, the thermostats will be set at 17 C. In the summer, air conditioners will be turned up to 29 C or turned off when rooms are empty.
"Those temperatures are actually not arbitrary," Taylor said. "Those actually, through research, have been shown to be the most comfortable for 80 per cent of the occupants in any given building."
There are exceptions to the rule, such as laboratories or experimental areas, where there is a requirement for maintaining higher or more consistent temperatures.
The university is also changing some of its locations for evening and night classes.
Nighttime savings
In the past, whole buildings stayed heated and lit for the sake of a few evening classes, Taylor said. Those courses will now be moved to a handful of the busiest buildings on campus.
"That way, we can actually close or shut down or reduce operations in the other buildings, while keeping those five or six core main buildings still operating in the evening hours," he said.
The guidelines also call on university staff and students to shut down computers at the end of the day and turn off lights when they are the last to leave a room.
UPEI has hired a consultant to perform an energy audit over the next few months to see how well the guidelines work and how much money the school is saving.
