Case Study: Peirce School achieves 20% lower natural gas use with Microsoft Azure and ICONICS FDD

Primary school’s energy management transformed by cloud-based insights

The Peirce School, a public elementary school in Arlington, MA, faced challenges in monitoring its heating and cooling equipment efficiently. With a limited maintenance staff and a budget-conscious town administration, the school's energy manager needed a better way to detect faults, reduce energy consumption, and avoid costly contractor call-outs. They turned to Microsoft Corporation and its Microsoft Azure cloud platform to host a new fault detection and diagnostics solution.

Microsoft, through its partner ICONICS, implemented the Facility AnalytiX software on the Azure cloud. This solution provided deep insights into equipment performance, storing years of data without requiring the school to purchase a server. The results were significant: problem detection was sped up by 15-20%, natural gas consumption was reduced by roughly 20%, and the lifespan of a major new chiller was protected. The success of this pilot at the Peirce School paved the way for state funding to expand the solution to other schools.

Peirce School

Melissa Topp

Director of Global Marketing