To the nomadic visitors, the touristy sites and hotels are all they need, but the island is home to 9,300 residents. To accommodate the locals, the island functions as any normal city or town would by offering the standard amenities and schools.

The school district on the island caters to the Nantucket community throughout the year. The Nantucket School District includes an elementary, middle school, and high school, as well as a Community School. The Community School offers year-around education programs for both children and adults with activities such as parenting classes, workplace skills, children exercise programs, and playgrounds.

Since the school district is used year around and for more than just classes, it is important that the schools energy usage is maintained. The school is open nineteen hours a day and seven days a week, so controlling the peak usage time has benefited the district. The Nantucket School Districts’ facilities manager, Jack McFarland, noted that, “Given that Nantucket is an island, we experience high energy costs as it is. We have installed KMC Controls to help us better manage our energy usage. We now have the capabilities through WinControl XL to program the controls in an occupied mode, which uses energy based on the peak usage times.”

The district chose Automated Temperature Control (ATC), a KMC authorized representative, to retrofit the schools with KMC products. Steve Lussier from ATC knew that KMC would provide dependable controls for the district. Lussier stated that, “With the schools being on an island it is important that the controls be reliable for the sake of the school’s location. The previous provider was not furnishing the stability needed, so we looked to KMC to supply the isolated schools with the needed controls.”

The district uses KMC products to operate its boiler and air handling units. There are also unit ventilators in classrooms and with future installations there will be individual controls in each classroom. All of the labs that are located in the district are completely controlled with KMC controllers. For the ease of controlling the various buildings, they have installed WinControl XL on the network LAN. This allows the building technicians total control of the functions in the separate buildings by a computer in their own office.

McFarland noted, “Everyone that uses the facilities would say that the classrooms feel more comfortable, due to the fact that we are able to control the air flow better. I do see this as a major benefit, but the real benefit to the whole community is that it saves money, since we are able to control when and how long facilities are running utilities.”