Building Automation & Controls
Take control of your building performance.
There are few things more important to maximizing the operation and efficiency of your building infrastructure than your property's building automation system. The right control not only can optimize the interaction between multiple building systems and large equipment, but also provide key insights into areas of opportunity for improvement, keeping your building systems running more efficiently while maintaining a healthier indoor environment for building occupants.
The Potential
The largest controllable operating expense alongside payroll in most commercial properties is the cost of energy consumption—over 60% of which being from HVAC and Water Heating across the majority of property types. Combine this with the cost of Repair, Operations, and Maintenance of building infrastructure, and you have an undeniably substantial pool of funds that your business very likely would rather use elsewhere. The right automation system can minimize these expenses, streamline operational procedures, improve occupant comfort, and even help to stave off unneeded capital expense.
Lodging
Office
Healthcare
Education
Reference: CBECS 2012, Table E1
Healthy Building Control Strategy
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, but—fortunately for all of us—a building’s Indoor Environmental Quality is both measurable and actionable. Live tracking and improvement of Building Health is made possible through both existing building equipment and advanced sensor technology (where necessary), both to provide a real-time picture of air quality status and to immediately adapt building equipment operation as space usage changes over time.
Does your building have a Pandemic Mode? Reopening and operations guidance from public organizations and private institutions contain very clear steps which should be taken based on building type and usage. Some of the steps should be leveraged to permanently improve the air quality of your building, while others may be more temporary measures which will reduce risk (but increase energy consumption) while we work together to battle the public health challenge at hand. With “Pandemic Mode”, these temporary changes can easily be switched off in the future when health risks subside (or on as needed in the event of another emergency).
Occupancy-based Opportunity
Many commercial building automation systems address major mechanical components but fail to take into account smaller distributed equipment such as lighting, plug loads, and terminal HVAC units. Each uncaptured device represents an opportunity for enhanced control. Depending on building usage and system type, in-room occupancy-based control in a typical commercial building can reduce equipment runtimes by 20% to over 40% and generate simple paybacks of 1.5 to 5 years.
era leverages a number of systems to deliver occupancy-based savings by embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) including EcoSmart Energy Management solutions.