HOW MULTI-LEVEL SMART MONITORING CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS TOWARDS ITS NET ZERO GOALS

Smart sensors can be a useful tool for any business looking to reduce its carbon use. By allowing you to keep track of exactly how much energy is used, and where, they can help you move from making educated guesses around what action you think you should be taking to informed, data-based decisions. Which, in turn, can lead to much quicker results.

Installing energy monitoring sensors is the obvious place to start, and a great first step for companies who may not have used this kind of monitoring technology before.

Devices like current-monitoring CT clamps give you a much clearer picture of where and how your energy is being used than simply relying on electricity bills alone. The clamps attach around the outside of live conductors, such as the wires going to different circuits in a fuse box.

This allows you to measure and track the energy being used by different parts of a site, for example lighting circuits, HVAC, or manufacturing machinery. Once you’re collecting this data, you can really start to see how and where your energy is being used.

It can help spot areas of waste, such as lights or air-conditioning being left on when no one is using the space. It can also help with preventative maintenance as you can spot changes in the energy being consumed by machinery which may indicate a fault – allowing you to tackle the problem before it becomes a bigger issue.

Clamps like this can be installed with minimal disruption, often without needing any production downtime, as you don’t even need to turn the power off to install them.

Energy monitoring sensors are a great first step in your energy monitoring journey but if you’re looking to make big changes fast the real gains come when you begin to layer different sensors up.

Jamie Burbidge, Product Manager for Pressac, said: “Using sensors throughout your buildings, to monitor everything from occupancy to room conditions allows you to create a multi-level picture of exactly how they are being used.

“By providing accurate, real-time information on all aspects of the day-to-day operation of your buildings you can start to make impactful changes quickly and easily.”

Take, for example, occupancy monitoring. In isolation, the data from the sensors will tell you which rooms are the most heavily used or which are under-used, but you may not know why.

Add in a room conditions sensor and you begin to understand whether rooms are empty because it’s too noisy, the lights are too bright, or it’s too dark.

With energy monitoring on top of this, you’ll be able to see whether employees switch lights off after meetings or whether they get left on when the rooms are unoccupied. Likewise, with heating and air-conditioning – are you unnecessarily heating or cooling areas of low use?

Door and window sensors are another potential tool in your armoury, helping to monitor whether there are any leaks of heat or air-conditioning wastage, while indoor air quality monitors will help to highlight the efficiency of air conditioning and filtration systems.

Creating a multi-layered smart building requires careful consideration. With so much useful data available you need systems in place to ensure you can interpret and act on it quickly and easily.

It may be that you already have a Building Management System in place, which the data can feed into, or you may need to decide from the many options available. Starting with your hardware (i.e. the sensors) first gives you the best chance of creating an adaptable, future-proof smart building.

The world of smart monitoring, like many other aspects of IoT, is rapidly changing and it’s essential that the sensors you choose won’t cause you problems in the future when you need to change or add bits on to your existing systems.

Wireless devices speak to each other in languages known as protocols. Always look for system-agnostic sensors which operate on an open wireless protocol.

Closed protocols mean you have to buy all components from one specific manufacturer in order for them to speak to each other, which can limit the opportunities for expansion further down the line.

It’s also helpful if those devices have ready-made connections to some of the most commonly-used cloud platforms like AWS, IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure.

If you’d like more information about creating a smart building and the sensor technology involved you can contact Pressac on +44 (0)115 936 5200 or visit www.pressac.com for more details.