by Ken Hejmanowski, Director of Product Management
February 3rd, 2015

At the end of the day, BuildingIQ is about saving money through saving HVAC energy use in large commercial buildings.  In order to accomplish this, the thermal behavior of the building under various conditions must be learned by our system, and then used to run the building’s HVAC more efficiently in present and future conditions.

To deliver on this, BuildingIQ primarily uses automated monitoring and control of just a few key Building Management System (BMS) points. But the BuildingIQ solution also consists of a Managed Services piece, which means your building’s operations are overseen 24/7 by a highly trained and skilled BuildingIQ operations team. To put the latter more simply: we’ve got your back!

The BuildingIQ operations team is responsible for ensuring the system is delivering on guaranteed comfort and savings. They are continuously monitoring performance, looking for inefficiencies to remedy, and asking questions of the building: what is happening right now (good or bad), what is causing it, what will happen in the future, and how can we affect it?

To support answering these questions, the BuildingIQ portal does three important things:

1. It brings together data that previously lay separated and hidden away in things such as the BMS, utility bills, meters, third-party data providers, and weather service forecasts.
2. It uses various data displays, visualizations and interactivity to support analysis and understanding of large amounts of real-time and historical information.
3. It goes beyond analysis to effect change. It enhances performance of the building’s HVAC system using Predictive Energy Optimization™ software. Remotely, in real-time, it fine-tunes to improve HVAC efficiency.

The first item can’t be emphasized enough: your building’s data is finally unlocked and brought together into a single, easily accessible and useful database that supports analysis and understanding. And speaking of accessibility, this isn’t confined to a user located at the building site. This consolidated operational awareness is available to you from anywhere in the world—securely, of course—via a web browser and an Internet connection.

Regarding the second item, the interactive visualizations are some of the quickest and most powerful ways the BuildingIQ system communicates the past, present and future building behavior. They support the user’s ability to identify patterns, trends and exceptions in a building’s operations, both for very short and very long periods of time.

You’ve probably seen dashboards and visualizations in other systems that attempt to dazzle you with lots of gimmicky gauges, cutesy metaphors, and a kaleidoscope of colors. While these may grab your attention and seem impressive at first glance, they quickly become tiresome and get in the way of improving performance.  The design of the BuildingIQ dashboards and visualizations leverage well-established principles of human perception and data analysis, because data only becomes valuable when it can be understood and becomes actionable. But more about this in a future article.

The third item goes to the heart of the benefits BuildingIQ can bring to building performance. Building Management Systems are never a once-and-done installation. Too many things are in flux, from occupancy levels to interior configuration to usage. HVAC components are changed out, subcontractors tinker and override settings, and efficiency degrades. It’s inevitable. BuildingIQ software is designed to detect problems early, zero in on inefficiencies and continually identify the least-cost path to optimum HVAC performance. And it doesn’t just point things out, it makes things happen.

We know that building personnel are busy people. You may not have the time to log in to the BuildingIQ portal on a daily or even a weekly basis —and with BuildingIQ’s automated control combined with its managed services, frankly you don’t have to.  But its consolidated data repository and analytical power is there, ready and accessible, anytime, anywhere you need it.