Schedules and Calendar Schedule best practices

General
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I have a large school district with N4 server where I am curious find best practices for holidays and summer sessions the school district uses in renting out only portions of their buildings… where my job is to help them keep equipment runtime to minimum for energy savings. Prior to any of our work the school district just ran a Monday through Friday schedule 365 but they could save a lot of energy in summer by not scheduling equipment!

Am I on track with these thoughts? On server create a new folder:

  1. Add a calendar schedule, name it Holidays which is also meant for any days the school is not in session like Spring Break and Summer Break

  2. Make all equipment level schedules reference this holiday schedule on the equipment level schedule “Special Event Tab”. Holiday’s on the special event tab need to be set as False (we use Boolean schedules)

  3. Create a new special Graphic for GUI date picker so facilities management can input date ranges for the Holiday calendar object

  4. ???

This is where I need help in crafting a step 4. Summer Programs only use about 50% of the building mostly the schools Front Office, Gym, and Cafeteria HVAC units.

  1. Create another Calendar Schedule for each building, name it Summer Programs

  2. Date pick for each building all Summer dates for Summer Sessions

  3. ???

But now it gets tricky as I think equipment level schedules can only reference one calendar schedule object on the special event tab.

Would I need multiple Boolean schedules at the equipment level and add in IF/ELSE logic to determine Normal Occupancy or a Summer Mode with is generally only about 50% of the HVAC in the building but is unique zoning building to building. Also note every individual HVAC unit has its own Bool Schedule.

We are also running Optimal Start Logic on all HVAC equipment where for that it is required to reference ONE Boolean Schedules Next Start Time and Next Value! … So if we had 2 equipment level schedules now the Optimal Start which is used in both cooling and heating would be broken!

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School systems typically have a supervisor with a calendar schedule as well as their regular schedules. They send those to the subordinates. Since school years are typically planned out a year in advance, it’s easy to implement.

the JACEs at the schools will have a read only schedule from the supervisor and a local schedule that can be modified if the supervisor goes down. However, usually the schedules have everything they need from the supervisor, so the local schedule is a moot point

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