What Are Smart Buildings, and Where Can They Be Found?
Smart buildings offer valuable building services, such as controlled lighting, optimized temperatures, and top indoor air quality. They may be designed from the ground up with building intelligence in mind or retrofitted with integrated systems. Although this sounds similar to a building automation system (BAS), smart buildings expand a BAS by offering additional tools, such as 24/7 remote monitoring and proactive maintenance based on analytical insights.
Yet, what makes a building “smart?” In short, the definition may differ according to what building owners or mechanical services providers (MSP) want to achieve. However, there are a few elements that connected systems share. By combining these components with practical tools, service and facility managers can realize several benefits. Learn what a smart building is and explore the missing ingredient to optimizing smart buildings.
Defining Smart Buildings and Their Use Cases
Smart buildings contain and connect systems providing energy, comfort, and indoor air quality. They use IoT (Internet of Things) sensors to convey data to remote monitoring tools, such as our Building Optimization Broker (BOB). Smart buildings monitor themselves 24/7 to prioritize what needs maintenance along with a root cause diagnosis in order to take action with proactive service workflow automation to quickly dispatch a technician to fix the issue. In addition, advanced fault detection and diagnostics enable service and facility managers to optimize operations beyond what’s possible in traditional designs with manual oversight.
Key components of a smart building include:
Sensors: IoT devices allow facility managers to observe and measure equipment and systems performance 24/7 for proactive maintenance.
Connectivity: Cloud-based technology platforms enable mechanical service providers (MSPs) to remotely collect and trend data to stay on top of issues
Autonomous control algorithms: Smart buildings utilize digital ASHRAE-based rules to continuously analyze trends for outlier conditions impacting energy, comfort, and indoor air quality.
Data analysis with a diagnosis: A system, like your best technician, provides the unique combination of here’s the problem, the impact, and recommended fix to prioritize maintenance before a tenant calls to complain.
Benefits of Smart Buildings
Building owners and MSPs may realize different benefits relating to their overall objectives. Most want to achieve efficiencies, control energy costs, improve comfort levels, and maintain optimum equipment performance. The advantages of intelligent building solutions consist of:
Decreased operational expenses
Lower operational risk
Increased space or occupancy utilization
Enhanced sustainability initiatives
Improved tenant and occupant satisfaction rates
Reduced capital expenses
Smart buildings also enhance staff and occupant wellbeing and productivity by maintaining the goldilocks zone – ideal temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels. Ultimately, smart buildings also reduce costs and help facility and service managers understand their return on investment. They optimize ideal outside fresh air exchanges (aka make-up air) to keep occupants safe while not accidentally over ventilating spaces that result in unnecessary heating and cooling costs.
Examples of Smart Buildings
Smart buildings are everywhere and suitable for all industries. For example, building intelligence uses multiple data sources, such as outside weather information and occupancy details to improve chiller or boiler operation efficiency. College campuses or commercial real estate may collect data from a security system and other IoT occupancy sensors to identify unoccupied spaces that can be optimized.
The often-missing ingredient in smart buildings is energy consumption visibility to root out energy waste.
Without visibility, you can’t answer simple questions such as:
Is the building getting better or worse?
Have past improvements been successful?
Where are the best-prioritized improvements?
Energy utility dashboards combined with building analytics help to answer those questions. Building optimization tools like the Building Optimization Broker (BOB) identify energy waste and opportunities for improvement in three ways.
) Track monthly electric and gas utility consumption
) Automate monthly utility bill reporting to derive an Energy Star score
) Detect energy waste before your next utility bill by optimizing HVAC systems
This approach benchmarks your building(s) against like peers and answers those simple questions to continually improve energy, comfort, and preventative maintenance.
Using Intelligence to Improve Facilities
Smart buildings support energy efficiency and management, reduce costs and carbon footprints, assist with sustainability initiatives, and enhance tenant and employee wellbeing. Moreover, they automate systems and workflows, allowing owners and MSPs to oversee facilities remotely and reduce time-consuming processes. Contact us to learn how to use BOB’s building intelligence + energy benchmarking + service workflow automation to your advantage.