Energy, Water and Indoor Air Quality Monitoring
At our eFACiLiTY® Building, the energy, water and indoor air quality parameters are constantly monitored 24/7, 365 days. This is achieved by installing several meters and sensors, both wired and IoT, connected to the Building Automation System (BMS/BAS) and our eFACiLiTY Energy Dashboards.
Green Building Dashboard:
All captured readings along with historical comparisons are displayed in an easy to understand manner and LIVE in the energy dashboard that is displayed in a large screen display in a highly visible common area for all the building occupants, managers, facility mangers, management to view. This generates awareness for the building occupants while it keeps the facility managers/maintenance team on their toes to ensure that there is no wastage of energy/water, all equipment including the solar plant is properly maintained and the indoor air quality is good at all times. This also increases the transparency of the quality of maintenance and accountability of respective supervisors/technicians ensuring effective maintenance and energy and waste conservation.
The green building dashboard is aimed to improve the awareness of the occupants and be mindful of the energy utilization and take pride in savings leading to a green and safe environment.
Energy Monitoring:
- Smart Meters have been installed for monitoring the energy use across categories including Outdoor HVAC units, Indoor HVAC units, DG Power used, UPS & IT Systems, Servers (24/7 operation), Lighting load, Kitchen use, Pumping & Water Treatment, Lift etc.
- All the meters are connected to the Building Automation System that monitors and stores the readings every minute for some high use utilities and 30 minutes once for less used, while the live data is displayed in the dashboard
- The dashboard displays current utilization, cumulative utilization for the whole day, comparison with the previous day and last 7 days average
- The solar power generated, solar panel temperature, irradiation level, DG power utilization are the other energy related readings that are displayed that helps to analyse and take steps for further optimization
- Energy saved in KW, energy saved in monetary value and the number of trees saved along with equipment type wise consumption are displayed in the dashboard for better understanding of the occupants
Water Use Monitoring:
- Electromagnetic flow meters for monitoring the filtered fresh water usage, rain water usage and recycled water usage
- All the meters are connected to the Building Automation System that monitors and stores the readings every 15 minutes, while the live consumption is displayed in the dashboard
- The dashboard displays current utilization, cumulative utilization for the whole day, comparison with the previous day and last 7 days’ average
Indoor Environmental Quality Monitoring:
- The multi-story facility is divided into several zones for tracking the indoor environment quality parameters
- Wired CO2, Humidity and Temperature sensors are installed in every single zone and also meeting / conference rooms or in other words all densely occupied spaces. These sensors are connected to the Building Automation System that stores all the reading 15 minutes once and the live readings are displayed in the dashboard
- IoT sensors to monitor the PM 2.5, PM 10, TVOC and humidity, are installed in multiple zones for live monitoring. The eFACiLiTY® software pushes this data into the BMS database
- The CO2 and IoT sensor data is used to automatically adjust the quantum of the indoor filtered fresh air supply into the facility to ensure excellent air quality while conserving energy.
- Variations between the indoor temperature and the set temperatures in all occupied spaces are constantly monitored and the breaches lead to raising alarms and work orders automatically to identify the root cause and fix quickly (predictive maintenance) reducing energy wastage due to faulty equipment/sensors.
- Any breach in indoor environment quality parameters lead to similar alarms/work orders towards predictive maintenance and corrective measures for ensuring best indoor environmental quality at all times.
Daily Email Reports:
- Though the data is stored in the system (BMS system and eFACiLiTY® software) and several reports are available to view this data, it is often felt that the monitoring and optimization is lacking in most organizations. This prompts for pushing the reports to the concerned people and their managers to ensure that things are well taken care of.
- Daily reports are emailed to the Maintenance Team, HR Team, HR Manager and the top management with daily consolidated utilization for the past 8 days (1-week data plus 1 day for comparison), average daily utilization for the last 1 week and average daily use for the last 30 days.
- In case of any excess use, to determine the root cause, hourly usage data is also emailed. Air quality and solar power generation data is reported 15 minutes once as the same is needed at more frequent intervals for root cause identification.
- The following reports are sent on a daily basis:
- Consolidated report of daily energy used across categories (listed under Energy monitoring) and water used (filtered fresh water, recycled water and rain water).
- Solar energy generation report along with the irradiation level and the panel temperature recorded every 15 minutes once
- Hourly energy utilization report categorised equipment type wise
- Hourly water utilization report by category
- Indoor Environment Quality monitoring report with 15 minutes once data including outdoor temperature, outdoor humidity, work space wise indoor readings covering temperature, humidity, CO2 level, PM 2.5 level, PM 10 level, TVOCs etc. This report provides the corresponding occupancy levels as well aiding useful analysis towards optimization.
- The management directive to the concerned managers/team is to review these reports on a daily basis, respond to that report quickly in case of any excessive usage/breached parameters, the issue is analysed, root cause identified and corrective measures are planned and implemented. The data is nicely formatted so that the reviewer doesn’t spend more than a minute or two every day to look for deviations.
- Any positive variation is also identified and reported so that the same can be replicated for improving the performance.