Modern Building Services

16 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES OCTOBER 2021 FEATURE VERTICAL FOCUS T here’s a significant but underserved segment of the market, characterized by small square footage and low complexity commercial buildings. Collectively, this segment represents up to 40% of commercial energy costs. These buildings require a non- traditional approach to BAS, much like we’re seeing in the residential market with smart homes. The development of plug-and-play intelligent devices and software applications that “just work” out- of-the-box to reduce to installed cost of controls upgrades will be essential if we are to achieve significant carbon reductions across the vast number of smaller commercial buildings across the UK. The standardisation of metadata offered by the widely accepted Project Haystack open standard enables smart devices to self-describe the data they generate, which enables configuration wizards to rapidly integrate multiple subsystems into a complete solution. Data format standardisation is also vital for then communicating the building performance information northbound to cloud applications used for managing such buildings remotely. Small buildingmarket opportunity As smart devices continue to proliferate in our personal lives, we can now easily add thermostats, sensors, cameras, and other controls to our homes. This is raising our expectations for the way workplace environments operate. The segment of the commercial building market that includes small to medium sized buildings is often called the “mid-market”. Examples of these types of buildings include local government buildings, small offices, leisure sites, small retail, and restaurant premises. Themid-market is long overdue to be fitted withmore intelligent controls that can better optimise energy use and assist withmaintenance issues. Market penetration has traditionally been relatively low due to the cost and complexity of implementation. Innovative products like those being developed for the smart home market are needed to create cost effective solutions for the segment, except that amore systems-oriented approach is needed since the smart home devicemarket is currently far too fragmented and siloed. Small buildings can be smart, too Just like in larger buildings mid- market buildings there are typically multiple sub-systems, including air conditioning, heating, lighting, energy monitoring, solar, and more. There’s a huge opportunity for building managers and owners to benefit from a unified building management systemmuch like their larger building counterparts already can. Currently most buildings have separate proprietary controls & management of each of these sub-systems with little or any data available remotely. By Chris Irwin , VP Sales, J2 Innovations The role of Haystack Tagging in enabling Plug-and-Play Controls VERTICAL FOCUS Hotels & Universities