An island of charm and beauty, Nantucket is located thirty miles from the mainland of Massachusetts. The island hosts many vacationers throughout the year offering them an abundance of activities from enjoying a day at the beach to shopping in Nantucket Town. Tourists can find a wide range of resorts and bed & breakfast inns.

To the nomadic visitors, the touristy sites and hotels are all they need, but the island is home to 11,000 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 elementary, intermediate, middle, and high schools, as well as a Community School. The Community School offers year-round education programs for both children and adults with activities such as parenting classes, workplace skills, exercise programs, and playgrounds.

Since the district is used year-round and for more than just classes, it is important that the school’s energy usage is maintained. The school is open seven days a week, so controlling the peak usage time has benefited the district.

“Given that Nantucket is an island, we experience high energy costs as it is,” said Jack McFarland, the Nantucket School Districts’ facilities manager. “We have installed KMC Controls to help us better manage our energy usage. We now have the capabilities 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.

“With the schools being on an island, it is important that the controls be reliable,” said Lussier. “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 located in the district are controlled with KMC controllers. For the ease of controlling the various buildings, the building technicians have total control of each separate buildings’ functions from a computer in their own office.

McFarland noted, “Everyone that uses the facilities would say 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.”