Building Automation System (BAS) alarms can be set up in controllers to generate a notification whenever something of interest has occurred. For instance, for primary systems such as Boilers, an alarm can be set up to notify the building operator whenever the Boiler Status is not following the Boiler Command. One would appreciate the usefulness of alarms when they recognize how complex building systems are, and how many different components have to work together to maintain acceptable indoor conditions in the space.
Buildings with a BAS backbone are considerably smarter than buildings without a full-fledged BAS. However, this does not mean that these buildings are energy efficient or that the indoor space conditions are always at optimal levels. It only means that the building has a BAS backbone that has the potential to optimize building performance. Often times, these buildings do not fulfill their potential. While several reasons can be attributed to this, two main reasons are that it is natural for equipment to degrade over time, and building systems undergo changes that aren’t ideal and these changes may go unnoticed for a long period of time.
Building Energy Analytic Platforms like CopperTree Kaizen are advanced Fault Detection and Diagnostic (FDD) and Energy Information Systems (EIS) that, among other functions, can detect faults and issues in a building by analyzing data. They can also be used to quantify and visualize energy consumption in a building. They rely on data from the controllers which is stored externally either in a local database or collected by a data archiving system (appliance or utility). Building Energy Analytic Platforms are superior to BAS Alarms because they are able to perform advanced analysis on large amounts of data and also establish relationship between building systems in a seamless manner. They can also perform other functions like reporting and virtual metering at a building and portfolio level which basic alarms are incapable of doing. The analysis of data is not limited to just a particular period in time, instead it can be done on all of the data for the building. CopperTree’s Community Library for instance has hundreds of rules that can be applied on data from a building to detect issues. These rules are far superior to basic BAS alarms and can also calculate faulty conditions and prioritize them based on a logic defined within the rule.
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CopperTree Analytics
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