150 Lonsdale St, Melbourne
In the month of October 2016, one of the buildings from the Buildings Alive program which showed outstanding results was 150 Lonsdale Street in Melbourne. Take a look at its results, and the strategies used to achieve them!

Building Bio
- A-grade commercial office tower
- NLA: 28,755m²
- Floors: 29
- Built: 1974, refurbished
- Central core floor plates ~1,125 m²
- Location: Melbourne CBD
- Owner: Charter Hall
- Facilities manager: Knight Frank
- Building services contractor: A.G. Coombs
- Commenced with Buildings Alive’s REF Service: 20 March 2014
Performance Summary
A sample day in October
This graph, taken from one of 150 Lonsdale’s daily REF messages, shows the reduction in electricity consumption between 20th October (blue line), and a comparable recent day (27th October 2015, red line) and REF’s expected profile (green line). REF performance monitoring shows a noticeable improvement in October.
Strategies for success
The facilities management team and building services contractors worked with Buildings Alive’s engineers to improve building efficiency. Primary focus was on the air handling system that continually mixes air from a hot deck and cold deck. Significant energy savings were made through improvements including:
- Introduction of static pressure reset to the air handling units
- Adding dampers to the hot deck ductwork, to separate heating and cooling modes
- Improvements to the supply air control strategy
- Chiller and boiler outside air based temperature lockouts
- Seasonal floor set point changes
Long term performance
While 150 Lonsdale Street has shown impressive performance in October 2016, this is really just continuation (and stepping up) of a longer term trend.
Since Buildings Alive’s service commenced in March 2014, 150 Lonsdale Street has saved a total of $90,585 on their electricity bills, and 569 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
These results can be seen below in the graph of energy usage. Lines in red represent an increase in energy usage compared to baseline, and lines in green represent a decrease, or improvement. The dotted line shows the “moving average” saving which by the end of October had reached an incredible 42%.