Remote Monitoring Solutions

Lighting Systems

Lighting systems often consume the single greatest amount of electricity (20- 45%) in commercial buildings so it is important to integrate this data into the CCC. It is also essential the consumption of the electricity is tied to occupancy and natural sunlight availability (security purposes excluded).

Parking Systems

Remember the days of driving around and around trying to locate a vacant parking spot in a parking structure wasting time and creating additional greenhouse gas by wasting fuel? Today sensors mounted in parking structures send vacancy data to a command center. Through directional arrows, and numeric display signs, drivers can be redirected to the vacant stall on the respective floors. Furthermore signage adjacent to the parking lots located at street level, can also display in real time the number of vacant stalls (if any) so drivers are not wasting valuable resources driving to an already full parking structure.

Machine Efficiency Monitoring

The ability to be able to monitor buildings energy consumption and costs has been available for quite some time but recently technology has evolved to measure the efficiency on individual assets ex. pumps and motors in real time.

Imagine each machine gathering and sharing data as an individual cost and performance centre. Factoring in business intelligence, we are now also able to predict when the motors will fail and the cost of NOT maintaining the asset.

In essence it is a continuous commissioning process and could form the basis of a new maintenance philosophy – Performance Centered Condition Based Maintenance. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is right around the corner when less efficient motors and pumps will be reassigned to other machines which are running more efficiently.

< p>The Future

Imagine machines, buildings, cities, countries so connected and integrated through remote monitoring whereby the consumption, costs, performance of everything is monitored in real time, enabling inhabitants to modify behaviour which results in an outcome for the betterment of future generations. Now that’s sustainability.

To say that FM technology is literally changing before our very eyes would be at best an understatement, and at worst, an overused cliché. Faced with the almost overwhelmingly reality of new and emerging FM technologies in today’s workplace that have been discussed in this paper, it is understandable that technology fatigue and a keenly felt visceral reaction can occur when FM leaders simply do not know where to begin, in embracing and utilizing this new technology that has the potential to turn the world upside down, or rather, it is hoped, right side up.