Engineering and
consulting, from
building optimization
to retrofit projects.
We work across commercial, multi-residential, institutional and industrial buildings: measuring how a building actually runs, quantifying the gap against design intent, scoping and designing the work that closes it, then verifying the savings afterwards, with the uncertainty stated alongside the number.
Our seven
service lines.
Quwa Smart Services is an engineering consultancy serving commercial, multi-residential, institutional and industrial facilities. Audit, design, implementation oversight and verification are delivered by the same team.
News and updates.
Project films, programme deadlines and completed assessments.
More than ninety
buildings assessed.
More than fifty commercial and forty multi-residential buildings assessed through condition assessments, ASHRAE Level I–III audits, energy modelling and reserve fund analysis. A quarter of them went on to secure retrofit funding.
Field work across central plants, rooftop equipment, boiler rooms and building envelopes: Calgary, Hamilton, Toronto and beyond.
Fourteen cities,
four provinces.
From Vancouver to Montréal, across British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. Office towers, retail plazas, housing co-operatives, manufacturing plants and data centres.
Our four-step
method.
We examine controls and sequences before equipment. A capital project scoped inside a building whose controls are misreporting gets sized against a load profile that is itself an artefact of the fault.
Measure
Clamp-on instruments, temperature loggers and twelve months of utility data. Nothing cut or drilled, and no capital request to establish what is happening.
Diagnose
Find the gap between design intent and how the building actually runs. It is usually a sequence, a schedule or a sensor, not a machine at the end of its life.
Quantify & fund
Energy, carbon and cost, in the format the funder scores. A quarter of the buildings we assess go on to secure retrofit funding.
Verify
Savings confirmed under IPMVP against a fitted baseline, with the confidence interval published beside the headline number.
444 5th Avenue SW,
Calgary.
A 23-storey Calgary office tower built in 1972, assessed for Aspen Properties across five studies under the BOMA Phase II program.
We found an outdoor air sensor frozen at 24 °C. Downstream of that single stuck reading: no economizer, no weather-responsive control, an air handler cooling supply air to 5 °C in August while floor units reheated it, and boilers holding 69 °C through a Calgary summer with nothing to heat.
Chiller coefficient
of performance.
Coefficient of performance is cooling delivered divided by power drawn. The model below runs the formula on the measurements from that building. Adjust the loop ΔT to see its effect on the result.
Q-Peak: our demand response aggregation platform.
Q-Peak is our aggregator platform for the IESO Save on Energy Peak Performance Program. It forecasts the peak, dispatches the curtailment across the portfolio, proves the reduction against baseline, and settles the payment.
Technical notes.
Notes on demand response, central plant performance and measurement and verification, written from buildings we have instrumented.
HVAC as a demand response asset
The chiller plant is usually the largest controllable load in a building. Ontario pays for that flexibility, provided the reduction can be proven against a baseline.
What a COP of 1.0 indicates
A coefficient of performance near 1.0 indicates a plant moving water rather than heat. The arithmetic that shows it, and the unit error that hides it.
Why we adjust the baseline, not the results
A mild winter can produce apparent savings that never happened. IPMVP Option C adjusts the baseline to the reporting period's own weather.
Start with twelve
months of utility
data.
Twelve months of utility bills and an afternoon in the mechanical room is usually enough to establish whether a building has a capital problem or a controls problem.