Commercial Lighting Upgrades Drive Energy & Maintenance Savings for Transwestern Real Estate 

THE OPPORTUNITY 

Transwestern Real Estate is a provider of agency leasing, property and facilities management, tenant advisory, capital markets, development, research and sustainability. Its 2020 K Street location is a 12-story multi-tenant office building with a three-story garage in Washington, D.C. managed by LaSalle Investment Management. 

The building is over 20 years old with rudimentary lighting control. Transwestern was unable to track building usage and lacked the ability to turn lights on and off as needed because switches were absent from the space. Additionally, some building tenants were international law firms that had global operating hours, requiring some offices to be lit during the late-night hours.

Without an effective zone control capability, a tremendous amount of energy was wasted trying to accommodate clients with late-night operations. “When I drove by the building at night, it was lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Natasha Evstigneeva, senior vice president portfolio manager, Transwestern.

"We needed a user-friendly and cost-effective lighting control solution to intelligently manage our different lighting needs across the building to reduce energy usage and costs. We see tremendous opportunity with networked control solutions that offer building owners control, flexibility and real-world insight."

Todd Smith - Business Development Manager

THE SOLUTION 

Transwestern chose Daintree solutions from Current, after evaluating multiple solutions; Daintree met the stringent criteria for reliability, central control, ease of installation and use, and cost-effectiveness.

In addition, Daintree provides a wireless control solution for smart buildings, allowing Transwestern to specify commercial lighting profiles to meet each tenant’s lighting needs and to maximize energy savings from unoccupied spaces. Its ControlScope Manager (CSM) controls the lighting fixtures through a standard-based ZigBee mesh network, enabling each lighting zone to provide maximum flexibility to lighting control strategies. By using the trusted ZigBee standard rather than proprietary technology, Daintree ensures unmatched reliability and flexibility to design and re-design the system to address a dynamic environment.

With CSM, Transwestern can also define and refine individual tenant requirements as they move in and out of the building. By logging into a standard Web browser, they can create custom lighting profiles for each building tenant, monitor and report energy usage and savings in real-time, and translate that energy information into action for maximum savings.

THE RESULTS

Approximately 3,400 commercial lighting fixtures in the offices and lobby area, with an additional 100 in the parking garage, were enabled to create a fully integrated, highly efficient network, giving Transwestern a holistic view of the building’s energy consumption.

“Every area of the building, including each tenant’s individual office space, the lobby, and the parking garage, has its own unique lighting needs,” said Smith. “We audited the entire location, assessed those individual needs, and designed the system to provide the proper energy-saving solution that supported all tenant requirements, with Transwestern now easily in control of it all.”

By adding intelligence to their infrastructure, 2020 K is expecting an annual savings of approximately $155,000 in energy and $20,000 in maintenance costs with a project that pays for itself in a little over one year. Not only are the savings obvious when driving by the building late at night, but they will show up on the company financial statements year after year.

Want to see how you can make your environment intelligent?
Contact us to get the conversation started.