Essential Questions to Ask When Choosing Your Smart Building Technology Company
Smart Buildings are the latest trend these days. People have been delving deeper into this modern technology and embracing it open-heartedly as they realized its benefits and advancements. There is no doubt that smart buildings provide a viable solution to the many problems which have arisen in the coming decades. Work has been made significantly more comfortable with the use of this new technology. So, naturally, more people have started to consider it. However, since this technology has saturated the market extensively, it has become quite challenging to understand which one would best suit someone. Consequently, buyers become confused and end up buying the wrong one for themselves. Following are some of the points which might help while one is choosing smart building technology;
Are they dependent on the building management system?
Even though building management systems store a lot of information, they should be the only data source. BMS has its limits, such as it is dependent on HVAC start-up and shutdown optimizations. That is why they might miss essential building operations, including preventive maintenance, vendor management, and advanced fault detection. These aspects are critical to note. That is why the smart building technology company should also have other data input sources so that the system is reliable in the future.
How is real-time data captured?
The critical thing to note here is that anyone can capture equipment level data by using off-the-shelf hardware. However, in most cases, these devices can capture up to 15 minutes of interval data. It might be sufficient when one has only high-level energy management. However, in the case of advanced fault detection, this range becomes insufficient. The reason is that it costs a great deal of money to capture a vast amount of data for short cycling. One has to make sure that the contractor they are choosing has an affordable solution for this.
Does the solution provider utilize non-sensor information?
The non-sensor information includes information which is on paper records. It has but is not limited to maintenance logs and spec sheets. It is essential to ask the solution provider if his system would capture and digitize non-sensor information. If the contractor does digitize it, one should also ask about his method of using it to streamline workflows. Apart from this, the contractor also needs to tell how that manipulated and tagged to individual systems to help non-technical building operators.
