Why good Indoor Air Quality will remain a pipedream without Building Analytics
As lockdown restrictions begin to ease over the coming months, attention is turning to the improvement of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in workspaces. Making adjustments to your building’s indoor environment without data-driven reasoning however can have unintended consequences. Seemingly useful changes, such as adjustments to temperature set points can often whitewash over critical problems and cause more harm than good. What’s more, IAQ may not be improved and the changes could even result in increased energy consumption and costs.
Read on to discover how building analytics can help you avoid building mismanagement.
Temperature control is not as straightforward as you think
Terminal Units (TUs), such as Fan Coil Units (FCUs) and Variable Air Volume (VAV) systems, will have a set temperature to maintain known as a ‘set point’. If the space temperature deviates too far from the set point then heating or cooling is demanded. This tolerance is controlled by the heating and cooling ‘dead bands’ which might be one degree plus or minus the set point. Depending on the TU, major plant items such as boilers, chillers, pumps, and Air Handling Units (AHUs) will then activate to hopefully bring the space temperature back to the set point temperature, or at least within the dead bands.
Temperature complaints are the biggest cause for call outs and they often result in set points being changed, dead bands being tightened or equipment being left ‘in hand’ meaning that assets, such as boilers, are forced to continually operate. Recently, there is a call for occupiers to have their own temperature controls as part of space-as-a-service initiatives and, in part, to help property managers avoid regularly micromanaging complaints. The reality however is that comfort issues are often linked to more complex, building-wide mechanical issues or the Building Management System (BMS) itself, so the complaints are unlikely to dissipate.
Faulty or flatlined sensors, seized valves, improper BMS control strategies and forgotten ‘in hand’ operation are common examples of issues that may be causing temperature complaints as well as excessive energy consumption. They are not always apparent during site visits and are rarely identified by other instrumentation. Instead, Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems will likely continue operating as if there are no performance issues. This results in a vicious cycle of ad-hoc callouts which may never solve the underlying issues.
Stop the cycle
Fully digitalising HVAC systems and providing facilities managers and engineers with live monitoring means that the complex issues behind temperature complaints can be quickly identified and fixed. A thorough digitalisation of your BMS and HVAC operation with building analytics is not only essential but favourable when compared to patchwork attempts at digitalisation which result in operational blind spots, creating more problems than solutions.
Building Analytics digitalises building systems and, more crucially, carries out continual data analysis to provide insight and guidance to stop the cycle. The risk with low-level or patchwork analysis is that inefficiencies are more likely to be treated as isolated issues rather than symptoms of building-wide problems. This is why there have been many discussions within the industry about ‘balancing’ energy efficiency and occupier comfort when in reality it is a false dichotomy.
A real opportunity to Improve IAQ and IEQ
The Telegraph reported that “Businesses will move from looking at the safety of buildings to looking at the safety of individual employees, wherever and whenever they are in a building.” This responsibility will likely fall on property managers and facilities managers, and we are already seeing IAQ and IEQ forming part of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for some management instructions.
With lower building occupancy levels as a result of Covid-19, both property managers and facilities managers have an opportunity to arrange work that is normally highly disruptive and iron out those underlying issues. We’ve previously talked about how you can tackle the complications that arise from lower occupancy, in a recent article.
At Demand Logic, we start by deploying our Data Acquisition Device (DAD) which continually copies the thousands of operational data sets from your BMS to our cloud-based analytics. Data insights and HVAC digitalisation then appear on our web-based platform which can be accessed via computer, tablet or smartphone devices. Deployment typically takes a few hours and valuable insight is available within a week.
We’ve been able to reduce comfort complaints by 50-100% whilst reducing energy consumption by up to 30%. This has had a measurable impact on thermal-related productivity of occupiers as well as an increased maintenance efficiency with a reduction of operational expenditure and fewer call-outs.
Manage your building's IAQ
We hope you’re now inspired to get on top of your facilities management with data intelligence tools. Get in touch for an initial chat by calling +44 20 7193 4212, or drop us an email at info@demandlogic.co.uk.
