Goodway Presents: Your Building is Calling — Web-Enabled Building Management

Goodway and Just Venting would like to give you a glimpse of web-enabled building management that can pull you headlong onto the energy technology fast track!  Imagine:  You’re walking on the eighth fairway and your smartphone chirps to tell you the occupants on the 14th floor of your building have turned the thermostat down big time and energy consumption levels are increasing faster than you would like.

A little later on in the day you get a reminder that you need to change the filters on the 3^rd and 9^th floor air conditioners. You send a quick text to your maintenance manager and get back to the business of your short game. In the evening you check in to see if the programmable thermostats in your building have switched to their night settings to help keep energy costs down.

The internet, you have just discovered, is good for more than phishing scams, Facebook status updates and videos of piano-playing cats.   It has become a medium through which you can manage your building’s mechanical systems.

Welcome to the world of web-enabled building energy management.   The price of admission is simply a web-enabled computer or other device.  (Plus, of course, the right software and controllers to link your thermostats, valves, sensors, pumps and fans to your network.)

The software program itself can be either a building management software program that you own and which resides on your servers or one which you access as Software as a Service, in which case it will reside somewhere in ”the cloud”.

So what does a system like this enable you to do?

Monitor – You can remotely monitor the performance and condition of all your building’s mechanical systems – chillers, boilers and sensors for everything from CO2 levels to thermostat settings.  Receive automatic alerts about system condition or occupant actions.

Control – Directly control settings on blowers, pumps, ducts, valves thermostats and any other equipment that you have set up with a web-enabled controller.   Respond to changes in your building’s condition in real time.

Report – Generate reports on building energy performance from a variety of perspectives to assist you in your decision-making.  You can access data such as power consumption, coolant temperature, thermostat settings or a litany of other key data.

So now, just when you think you can relax because you left the office or the shop, you discover the dark side of the internet-enabled, cloud-dwelling, remotely-connected world — the side nobody talks about.   “They” won’t tell you  about it but we at Just Venting will.

There is now no escape.   You can never get away.  It’s always there, lurking, hiding and waiting for you to sit down with a cold beer and the ball game or finally get that incredibly-light-sleeping baby to bed or sit down to relax with your family.

Because that, friend, is when your phone will ring.

Rich Silverman
Goodway Blogging Team