Case 1: Broward County Schools - "Rightsizing" in Renovation

    
Broward Co Schools-1

 

It is a big deal: over 200 schools in the Broward County School District (BCSD) are currently being renovated. Per Wikipedia: BCSD is the 6th largest school district in the country and 2nd largest in Florida with over 271,500 students and 327 schools and education centers.
 
Eighteen (18) of these 200 schools were designed using PowerCalc(tm). It provided a material "value add" for these renovations with savings for BCSD as described below.
 
Using PowerCalc, existing conditions were documented. Recognizing that not all renovations are a total demolition, PowerCalc did the new design based on documented  existing conditions to "rightsize" and locate the electrical equipment. Take a look at PowerCalc's automatically and simultaneously generated  1 Line diagram for more on how this works: Incredible 1 Line Diagram
 
PowerCalc  identified and corrected existing design issues with its approach. Here are a few examples:
 
1. An initial design for replacement of a new air handling unit specified installation of an  additional electrical panel located at some distance across the facility Instead, PowerCalc identified an existing electrical panel located next to the air handling unit to energize it at a fraction of the cost.
 
2. Another school called for replacement of the entire electrical distribution system. Rather than replacing equipment with the same sized equipment, PowerCalc's design replaced the existing equipment with smaller sized equipment that occupied less space and allowed for re-use of the                same electrical room.
 
In both of these situations, major expenditures were avoided in terms of the cost of new equipment such as electrical panels, conductors, and transformers while also saving installation costs and building modifications. A higher quality design was provided by PowerCalc with a 40% reduction in design time.
 
PowerCalc identified oversizing and undersizing issues with feeders and branch circuits, related overcurrent protection devices (circuit breakers and fuses) as well as excessive voltage drop.
 
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Join us for a Free Demo of  PowerCalc -  the 1st automatic electrical engineering design software in the cloud for compliance with the NEC and with simultaneously generated 1 Line Diagram!
 
When: Friday,  April 2 at 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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After sign up, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. You can also see our most recent demonstration on video: PowerCalc Demo: July 10, 2020  
 

Our software is a fully integrated design application that saves you time and money. This is PowerCalc...an incredibly powerful tool that's unexpectedly easy to use for compliance with the NEC. 

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About The Author

James Khalil, P.E. is President, Co-founder and Inventor of PowerCalc. He has 30+ years of experience at his MEP firm in Delray Beach, FL and with Carter Burgess (now Jacobs) in Fort Worth, TX; Mason & Hanger (now Zimmerman) in Lexington, KY; and Gee & Jenson (now CH2M) in West Palm Beach, FL. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas. His experience includes projects for Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the US Departments of Energy, State, and Defense; and universities, schools, health facilities, and arts centers.