In any school, office building or commercial center. Once the construction of the building is finished and turned over to the building management, problems with energy management begin to surface. What techniques can be applied to rectify this situation.

1. Different types of spaces should make use of different techniques:
   1. User pays:
      Can be applied to classrooms, dormitories, piano rooms, and any other rental places where the user has the responsibility for using the space.
   2. Conditional use:
      Can be applied to open offices, meeting rooms, libraries and similar shared spaces where no tariff can be charged to any particular user. These spaces can make use of energy saving controllers that allow operation depending on conditions, such as the time of day, having temperature thresholds, or making use of sensors.
   3. Scheduled or sensor control
      Public areas such as hallways, elevator lobbies, halls, outdoors and parking lots could either be controlled through a schedule or by using sensors.
2. A control center is not all knowing, and having local control would be more effective
   Some time ago, when an energy management issue arises, the knee jerk solution is to implement some form of centralized control, but such an approach is not only expensive, but it also doesn’t really solve the problem.
   1. Local automatic control
      For certain spaces, there are ways in which there would be conditions that would allow for local automatic control without having to rely on centralized control, central control would merely serve as a supporting role.
   2. What are some of the methods of conditional control?
      1. Insert card to use:
         Such as with a teacher’s card or a card borrowed from the administrator, only with this card inserted would use be allowed.
      2. Controlled time of use and temperature thresholds, this is especially suited to air conditioners.
      3. Preset time power reset
         This would prevent not turning off after use. Every day there would be specific times of the day where the power would be reset, this is accomplished by first cutting the power off, then after a short delay, the power is restored, but the equipment would remain off, the equipment could only be turned back on manually by the user.
3. Automatic energy saving methods
   1. Delayed auto off: After the user turns the lights on, the lights would automatically turn off after a certain delay.
   2. Sensor based auto off: When the user enters a room, they need to manually turn on the lights, the sensor monitors the presence of the user, when the user leaves, they can turn the lights off, but if they forget after leaving, the sensor detects their absence and automatically turns the lights off after a certain delay.
   3. Scheduled on and off.
   4. Reduced consumption control: alternate lamps, dimmed lights, temperature restrictions.
   5. Sensor control: Such as temperature, lux sensor both indoors and outdoors, occupancy sensor.