Combining BEMS and IoT
A little intro to BEMS
A Building & Energy Management System (BEMS) is responsible for the control and regulation of your buildings key systems, such as heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting and much more.
BEMS allows automatic responses to the internal environmental conditions, managing your systems to work together to one common goal or requirement.
This was a revelation for facilities teams, giving them the potential access to everything in one place with huge amounts of data. However, BEMS has always been deployed with a focus on automation instead of optimisation, meaning that your BEMS could be hugely underutilised against its potential
The impact of BEMS Technology
It can be responsible for monitoring a huge range of different systems with a single, or multiple buildings, for example:
- Heating and Cooling
- Ventilation
- Fire Safety systems
- Metering of utilities
- Lighting
The list goes on…
If these systems report values outside of the predetermined setpoints, such as temperature going above a specified point, alerts can be triggered, and action can be taken. Systems can also be configured to work with the outside weather conditions to decide when it is best coming on i.e. a heating system may need to run from 3 am in winter to get the building up to the set temperature they require at 8 am to start. In the summer, no heating may be required at all, or the start time for the heating may only need to be 7 am. The BEMS does these calculations, learning your building.
As BEMS has evolved, it’s allowed buildings to be better optimised for the comfort and security of their occupants, in addition to being able to better control energy costs. However, due to some of the constraints of BEMS, it might not have always been possible to add on additional improvements without them being cost-prohibitive.
This is where IoT comes in.
BEMS and IoT
With the rise of IoT in the last few years, there has been an increase in the number of innovative ways for facilities managers to use their current Building & Energy Management systems alongside a multitude of IoT data. The combo of Building & Energy Management Systems and IoT can greatly help building managers to achieve optimisation and ultimately create truly smart buildings, where this wasn’t possible or cost-effective to do so in the past.
Let’s look at the effect of BEMS and how you can combine this technology with IoT to help improve the way you manage your buildings.
Combining IoT & Building & Energy Management Systems
Within multisite estates, not every building can give back the ROI on a full-blown BEMS, but an IoT (internet of things) solution might tick all the boxes.
You can integrate IoT with most central BEMS supervisors to keep the same single monitoring platform but get the benefits of seeing more of your estate.
Having everything in one place makes all the difference when you want to put forward improvements and recommendations.
An example of where this may come into play is where you have a large estate. Some buildings are large enough to warrant a BEMS that controls the heating, ventilation, and cooling, through the boilers, AHU and Chillers, all working together under the control of the BEMS. The client has a BEMS supervisor where they can see the BEMS controlled sites all together in one place.
But then there are other buildings within your estate that may just have AC with a few local controllers on site. To install a BEMS at this type of site, the ROI could be anything up from 7+ years.
We have IoT solutions that can manage the AC locally and visually bring it up to the BEMS supervisor level so the facilities team can interact and monitor it the same as their larger buildings, but with an ROI of under two years. Our systems offer full functionality of the systems but utilising IoT technology to keep install and monitoring costs down.
In addition to remotely being able to access and control sites that had previously not been on the radar, you can also utilise the huge range of sensors available to the IoT market, reducing install costs through the benefits in wireless systems and add further monitoring to your existing BEMS sites.
About Thermatic Energy Services
We work with end-user clients to help them achieve their energy management targets. Our main focus is giving our customers visibility to their systems and data to allow them to make actionable decisions to reduce their energy consumption, improve their building operation and achieve their sustainability targets.
