Multizone systems are designed to handle the most extreme heating and cooling demands — simultaneously, all day, every day. The building’s actual needs never got a vote. One smarter control strategy changed that. Energy consumption dropped by more than 50%.
Your system was already trying to save energy. It just wasn’t trying hard enough. A smarter control circuit. The same comfortable room. Noticeably less mechanical cooling.
Conventional wisdom said turning down the heat at night would cost more to recover in the morning than it ever saved. Conventional wisdom was wrong. A real-world case study proved it — 9% less energy consumed, even when the overnight temperatures were colder.
You watched the videos. You had questions. David Strain — the inventor behind an internationally patented climate change solution — sits down to answer the ones that came up most. The invention, the principles, and the thinking behind it. In his own words.
HVAC stands for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning. In plain English, it’s the system that decides whether your building feels like a sauna, a meat locker, or something actually liveable. It heats the place in winter, cools it in summer, and — here’s the part most people never think about — it also pumps in fresh air so you’re not all slowly breathing each other’s lunch. Every office, school, hospital, shopping mall, apartment building, and factory has one. And in most of them, it’s running all day, every day, whether anyone’s paying attention to it or not.
Ah, the real question. Most heating and cooling systems were installed logic was developed decades ago and designed to run at full blast — no questions asked. They don’t know if the room is empty or full, cold or already warm, occupied or not. They just run. It’s like leaving your car engine idling 24 hours a day because you might need to drive somewhere later. The energy gets used whether it’s needed or not, and you get the bill either way. Add in aging components, poorly calibrated controls, and systems that were never optimized after installation, and you’ve got a very expensive problem hiding inside your walls.
Think of a control system as the brain of your HVAC. The furnace boiler and fans are the muscles — they do the heavy lifting. The control system is what tells them when to work, how hard, and for how long. A smart control system means your heating kicks in only when and where it’s actually needed. A dumb one — or an old one — just runs everything at full power all the time and hopes for the best. Most Many buildings were built with the dumb version. Upgrading the brain without replacing the muscles is often all it takes to cut energy bills dramatically.
Not necessarily — but probably yes, and here’s why. Older systems weren’t designed with energy efficiency as a priority. They were built when energy was cheap and nobody was sweating the planet. But the bigger issue isn’t age, it’s the logic. Many older HVAC systems use pneumatic controls — pressure-driven signals to tell valves and dampers what to do. When those controls are tuned and upgraded with modern logic, even a decades-old system can perform dramatically better. APS has been proving this since 1976. The equipment doesn’t always need to go — the thinking does.
Great news: in most cases, you don’t need to rip anything out. APS’s TRAINING MANUAL specialises in retrofitting — that’s the art of making your existing system significantly smarter without a full replacement. Think of it as giving your old HVAC a brain transplant instead of a funeral. New control logic is applied to the existing equipment, recalibrating how and when the system runs. Buildings that went through this process with APS have reported energy savings of 40% or more — without buying new boilers, new chillers, or new anything. The payback on the investment is often less than a year.
APS clients have collectively saved over $100 million in energy costs. Individual buildings have reported reductions of 40% up to 57% on their heating and cooling bills. To put that in human terms: if your building spends $200,000 a year on energy, you could be looking at $80,000 up to $114,000 back in your pocket — every single year. Five of the top ten school boards in Ontario, Canada saw direct results from APS energy logic. These aren’t estimates from a sales pitch. They’re numbers reported by the building owners themselves.
This is the question everyone’s afraid to ask, and it’s a fair one. The short answer is no — and in many cases, buildings actually become more comfortable after an APS retrofit. Here’s why: most inefficient systems don’t just waste energy, they also heat some areas too much while neglecting others. Smarter controls mean the right amount of heating or cooling reaches the right spaces at the right time. The people inside stop fighting over the thermostat. The building manager stops fielding complaints. And the energy bill quietly shrinks. Efficiency and comfort, it turns out, are not enemies.
APS — short for Analysts of Pneumatic Systems — looks at how your heating and cooling system is being controlled, finds where it’s wasting energy, and redesigns the logic so it runs smarter. They’ve been doing this since 1976. The founder, David Strain, developed unique control logic that has been internationally patented and independently verified. APS has worked with schools, hospitals, commercial buildings, and institutions — primarily across Ontario, Canada — and has documented the results in publicly available case studies. Their work is not theoretical. It’s been tested in real buildings, with real bills, for almost fifty years. APS no longer does contracting work, but focuses on freely sharing its constructive conservation developments in an effort to address climate change.
Building owners who have worked with APS report payback periods of around one year. That’s not a typo. When you’re cutting your energy bill by 40% or more, the cost of the retrofit tends to pay for itself quickly. After that, the savings are pure return — year after year. Compare that to a full system replacement, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes years or decades to recoup. The APS approach — upgrade the controls, not the hardware — is deliberately designed to deliver a fast and measurable return.
The principles apply to any building with an HVAC system — from a small office to a hospital campus. That said, the bigger and older the system, the bigger the waste, and therefore the bigger the opportunity. If you’re a homeowner with a standard residential system, some of these ideas still apply to how you manage and schedule your heating and cooling. But APS’s core work focuses on commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings — schools, office blocks, municipal facilities, manufacturing plants — where HVAC runs around the clock and the bills reflect it. If your building has a boiler room, it almost certainly has room to improve.
Both, and they’re not separate conversations. Every kilowatt-hour of energy your building doesn’t waste is a kilowatt-hour that didn’t require burning fossil fuels. APS’s three-person crew has been credited with avoiding over 60,000 person-years’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions — just through smarter HVAC control logic. At the same time, APS founder David Strain has developed an internationally patented invention that goes even further: a hydraulic motor design that, according to independent peer review, has the potential to reduce global fossil fuel consumption significantly. The energy bill and the planet turn out to be connected. Fixing one helps the other.
Not necessarily, control systems often hide significant energy waste. If a defective valve passes a million units of unwanted heat into an HVAC system, the system automatically injects a million units of cooling in to compensate, leaving the temperature very close to the same. No complaints, but huge energy loss.
View APS HVAC videos and the APS Manual for some common situations of hidden energy waste.
Contact APS Controls: [contact@apscontrols.org]