Depending on what "expert" you talk to there are over 60% of the buildings within the United States that are not "optimized". But what does that even mean? What is an optimized building? Throughout my career, I've seen well-meaning folks damage their building's HVAC and BAS systems in the pursuit of optimization. That's why I'm tackling this topic. The reality is optimization does not equal energy savings. You could achieve "optimization" by simply making sure all the different BAS you have are tied into a single user interface. So how do you deal with optimization? That is what we cover in this episode of The Building Automation Monthly Podcast. In this episode we will discuss: What optimization is How to avoid damaging your building during optimization Why you need to avoid retro-opto-commissioning My five-step process for optimizing your building automation system Here's a timeline breakdown of what we cover in the podcast: What is optimization and what isn't optimization (2:50) The upstream and downstream effects of optimization (4:55) Why how you optimize is more important than why you optimize (6:50) The dark side of economizer optimization (9:00) The two places you need to be careful when doing math (8:00) How to protect your code from the janitor operator (9:20) Why learning the art of systems thinking is so important (10:55) Retrocommissioning and optimization ARE NOT the same thing (12:40) The danger of retro-opto-commissioning (15:20) The five-step process for optimizing a BAS (19:00) Why you need to have SMART goals for your optimization projects (19:45) Why socializing your optimization strategies is the dumbest thing you can do (23:25)