Real-time building energy monitoring – a top trend in modern smart buildings

Monitoring a building’s energy consumption in real time represents atop trend in modern smart buildings, experts have argued.

The technology that enables intelligent, well-informed buildings is more prevalent than ever before thanks to its increased reliability and usefulness; smart building technology is also more cost-effective than it has been in the past.

Whereas it used to take an experienced office building manager years to understand and fine-tune building performance, the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it possible to gain immediate operational insights that can be used to quickly improve the bottom line. And while most office buildings aren’t likely to live up to these standards anytime soon, a whole host of “smart” strategies are now available with the technology readily accessible for just about any building to put into play.

Real-time Building Energy Monitoring systems are gaining traction among office building owners and managers as they remove the guess work out of how much energy a building consumes during normal operation.

Measuring the power consumption of your building assets can help you understand the energy footprint of your building overall; it can also help determine where energy is being wasted.

Real-time monitoring can also reduce energy costs through early identification of equipment faults and inefficiencies. Sensors attached to key operating equipment, such as motors, pumps and fans, can measure things like vibration, power usage, temperature, humidity and more.

By identifying anomalies in those measurements one can better predict when equipment is likely to fail, and fix it before it does. Being proactive about repairs (also called predictive maintenance) reduces the downtime experienced by occupants and prevents expensive repairs.

HeatingSave Building Management System BMS software –advanced controls and analytics features

The HeatingSave high level software is a web based user friendly and intuitive software application, delivering unrivalled control and monitoring of the heating system. Using just a browser from one desktop or laptop PC, tablet or smart phone you can control your entire building or a whole network of buildings. Software features include:

• Advanced planning of heating patterns and diary allowing 365 day programming with different patterns for each zone.
• Graph visualisation of every temperature, air quality, occupancy and on/off event ever recorded. Use these to identify problems with boilers, pumps etc. and also to prove that HeatingSave is working for you.
• Transaction and fault logging and reporting. Alerts include boilers failing to respond, or when they unexpectedly start to increase in heat (manually overridden by someone). Also sensors hitting maximum/minimum temperatures are displayed. Avoid expensive repair and maintenance costs by determining what the problem is first so you can either change the settings yourself or send the right person first time.
• Running Costs – View the costs of boilers, equipment like pumps or immersions, air-cons etc. The costs are broken down by site or by each system individually. They are then displayed daily, monthly and quarterly. You can even see the carbon usage of your building or collection of buildings.
• View your site as a schematic with temperatures and equipment status overlaid. Keep track of an entire site from one easy viewport.
• Easily manage the settings and parameters for the entire Building Energy Management System from one place.

If you’d like to find out more information on the HeatingSave Building Energy Monitoring System, please contact us, and our specialists will answer your questions and queries in a very fast and easy manner.