Education
Marshall High School Prop 39 Controls Replacement
Pneumatic-to-DDC conversion and HVAC swap in a historic high school.
Client
McKinstry Essention
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Service Line
A pneumatic-to-DDC controls retrofit at a 1931 LAUSD landmark — three buildings pulled onto one EcoStruxure front end.
Client: McKinstry (LAUSD Energy Manager)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Year: 2015
Service Line: Building Automation — Controls Retrofit
John Marshall High School has stood in Los Feliz since 1931 — a Collegiate Gothic landmark by architect George M. Lindsey, and the backdrop for everything from Grease to A Nightmare on Elm Street. In 2012, California voters passed Proposition 39, the Clean Energy Jobs Act. Marshall became the first public school in the state to put that money to work. McKinstry, LAUSD’s energy manager, brought Athena in as the primary HVAC and controls contractor on the retrofit.
The campus ran on pneumatic controls. We pulled the pneumatic actuators and replaced them with electric, ran new sensors, actuators, and network cable, and stood up a new DDC system that brought the chillers, boilers, cooling towers, and the rest of the HVAC plant onto one front end. Occupancy sensors drop the system into standby when a space is empty, so it stops conditioning rooms nobody’s in — and gives the energy back without losing the ability to bring a space up the moment it’s needed.
We converted the constant-volume multizone systems to VAV, controlling new double dampers on both decks, with VFDs on the supply and return fans to hold static pressure as the boxes modulate. Three buildings, one EcoStruxure system we designed and implemented, integrated into a single simplified front end.
The front end is the point. It reads in software and through a web browser, and a maintenance dispatch port lets LAUSD’s people across Los Angeles pull up the building remotely — see what it’s actually doing before sending anyone out, and skip the truck roll when it isn’t needed.
The retrofit was projected to cut the campus’s energy use by roughly 29% and take six figures off its annual electric bill. Not bad for a building that opened the same year as the Empire State Building.
The work didn’t stop here. On the back of Marshall, McKinstry awarded Athena a second Prop 39 retrofit on the same platform: the Santee High School Proposition 39 HVAC & Controls Retrofit.
Client / Energy Manager: McKinstry. Owner: Los Angeles Unified School District. Funding: Proposition 39 (California Clean Energy Jobs Act). Controls platform: Schneider Electric EcoStruxure.
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