The 5.5-acre Oakland Unified School District Downtown Education Complex is an innovative educational facility that contains three distinct schools which serve over 700 students. The site is also home to KDOL, a district-wide television station, a state-of-the-art district information technology center, and a community-based health clinic.
Sustainable design measures and practices are hallmark features of this unique campus. All buildings were built in a North to South exposure to use as much natural daylight as possible to best control solar heat gain, reducing lighting and HVAC loads. Walls and slabs were constructed to be conducive to thermal mass storage, reducing heating and cooling loads. Learning environments are enhanced and maintained by demand control ventilation strategies, operable windows for natural ventilation, and over-sized ceiling fans which provide additional ventilation in both heating and cooling modes.
The brains and nervous system of the complex is a Syserco installed Alerton Building Automation System that manages and controls the 5,000 plus I/O, 1,700 trend logs, and 2,000 alarm points. Supporting the exacting needs of the facility is a precisely engineered distributed LAN of nearly 200 Alerton unitary and global controllers. BACnet and Modbus integration to mechanical equipment, VFDs, and power monitoring equipment enhances the impact of the Alerton BAS.
