Bright Employee: Jamie Fales, Field Engineer, Audit & Feasibility

BLOG

Jamie FalesWe’re proud of the intelligent, passionate, and hardworking people that make up the Bright Power team. Each month, you’ll get a chance to meet one of them, understand how they contribute to the organization, and what makes them excited to come to work every day.

Meet Jamie Fales, Field Engineer, Audit & Feasibility.

What are some of the things you like most about working at Bright Power?
The culture. Bright Power is filled with really smart people and we support each other in taking advantage of opportunities to learn. Everyone has the drive to prevent climate change. It’s even written in Bright Power’s mission. 

What advice would you give a property manager looking at energy efficiency projects for the first time?
Ensure your site staff are on the same page and speak the same language. It’s important to keep logs from maintenance rounds that note what changes were made and why they were made in the first place. It will give you better insight into resolutions to tenant complaints, continuing issues and what the site staff is struggling to control. Added benefit – logs can create a proactive maintenance culture.

What’s the one service offering we have that you think is the most beneficial to clients and why?
Commissioning and Retro-Commissioning, no question. You can install the most efficient equipment, but if you don’t set it up correctly you might as well have not installed it at all! It can be incredibly frustrating for an owner to have paid for new high-efficiency equipment and not see the results he or she was promised. Commissioning and retro-commissioning can save energy, extend the lifetime of HVAC equipment, and reduce tenant complaints.

What are some projects and accomplishments you’re most proud of?
All of the Local Law 87 (LL87) work I do for our clients is something to be proud of. It starts as helping owners comply with a law, but these audits turn into something more. We’ve found major issues at buildings and fixed them. It’s amazing that you can change one thing and save the building a ton of money while lowering energy consumption.

With one client, they had installed a brand new air handler to cool the corridors. When I opened the access panels I found that the cooling coils had frozen over and nearly entirely choked off the airflow. This lead to overheated hallways even though the system was just replaced. We found that one issue early enough that the problem could be resolved before the cooling coils were permanently damaged or the room flooded. Thanks to LL87, the owner avoided a potential expense of thousands of dollars.