3 West North (3WN) is one of the newest buildings on the campus, built in 2005 to house a number of research laboratories as part of the Department of Physics. It includes drawing towers for making photonic crystal fibres, a 200-seater lecture theatre and two general teaching classrooms for 100 and 30 people, as well as various labs with equipment including lasers, lathes and furnaces. This vital research, however, is energy intensive, and the building has an annual electricity bill of £70,000.

Within the Department of Estates, significant investment has been made in improving the energy monitoring of buildings such as this, and through the Our Big Energy Challenge project, a departmental energy champion has been trained and now acts as a point of contact for the Energy & Environment team.

This champion, technician Harry Bone, together with Alan George, the Technical Manager for the department, helped organise the key people to get together and examine the energy information for the building. An action plan was put together and certain key changes to the operating regime were made, without risking the integrity of the research conditions.

The very positive results of this exercise can be seen in the graphs below showing the weekly electricity usage pattern before, during and after the changes were made.

Datasheets