Hotels and conference centers are challenged today with the same energy and equipment issues in cooling and heating systems that their customers face at home. Most have implemented in-room cost-saving equipment for limiting energy waste. But what about the common areas and the larger equipment that serves these areas? Smart building solutions are now available to not only monitor these areas, but also to improve on them.
Today, equipment controls and changing conditions are complex and challenging for the facility engineer. In most hotel environments, dedicated facility workers generally are not in-house, leaving this department to be served by third-party providers—adding costs and decreasing customer satisfaction when things go wrong. Smart building solutions that monitor equipment and detect problems can help simplify operations and reduce the risk of customer dissatisfaction. These solutions typically pay for themselves in months—not years—in terms of operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and energy reduction.
For example, a common area for hotel registration usually is served by a single air-handling unit. That unit is controlled by environmental variables inside and outside the area being served. When the unit is running at peak performance, these environmental factors like occupancy, outside air conditions and schedules are factors in providing comfort. If an air-handling unit’s coils start to leak (normal wear and tear based on use), the unit compensates to try to meet cooling or heating needs until it starts to struggle, causing variability in comfort and potentially health and safety concerns. You are not aware of this problem until either guests or employees complain. Not a good situation. This is one of hundreds of issues that can go wrong in a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system.
A new smart building technology, monitoring-based commissioning, has become a standard in building health and equipment care. Monitoring-based commissioning systems, sometimes referred to as MBCx, offer continuous monitoring and commissioning from start-up through the life of your equipment. The combination of visibility, intelligent alerts, fault detection and diagnostics, and advanced intelligence that precisely identify installation and operational issues in real-time are accessible to the entire team, anywhere and anytime. As issues are corrected, faults disappear, giving all team members confidence that the system is working properly. Most importantly, it provides a clearer baseline of how your building is operating to set a standard for operational efficiency throughout the building’s lifetime. With the MBCx solution, you can transform system noise into knowledge and action to ensure your equipment and systems are working in perfect unison and therefore maintaining comfort and health and controlling energy costs.
In most cases, monitoring-based commissioning systems have an immediate return on your investment. Once deployed, HVAC alone can have a less than six-month payback and can notify third-party suppliers of new conditions quickly. These systems act like an additional facility engineer and can provide energy consumption and carbon footprint reporting in real time. If the equipment is still under warranty, these systems could discover design issues and essentially be covered by the equipment provider. The coil leakage issue described above potentially could cost tens of thousands of dollars in energy waste annually.
Although smart building technology spans into a wide arena of different systems and services, MBCx has been a proven technology for close to 10 years now. These systems typically have hundreds of off-the-shelf analytics that are agnostic to the equipment vendor, are usually cloud based (which means no administration costs to users) and installed and validated within 30 days. They continuously track your energy consumption and identify the biggest energy waste conditions to focus on and they watch your equipment for you, giving you the confidence and security that your customers are satisfied.
Mark Pipher is VP & GM of FacilityConneX.