Before we delve deeper into examples of smart buildings, we would like to discuss smart buildings. We’ll walk you through what are smart buildings and how effective are they in our daily lives?
As a building or factory owner or an average household, you have probably heard of ‘smart building.’ More and more things have become smarter; the same is the case for smart buildings. They give more control to you so you can control your building environment, temperature, and all other operations.
The benefits of having more controls are humungous. To keep that in perspective, let’s suppose what if you would be able to remove occupants out of your room if the level of particulates goes up significantly, or reduce your electricity bills many times by strategically running your HVAC.
Doesn’t it sound appealing to you?
The results that you’ll get by these actions are unprecedented and insanely beneficial for your business and Earth’s environment. Some studies suggest 70% of large and small-scale organizations are likely to increase their investment in smart buildings in the foreseeable future.
Smart Building Technology Examples
Smart building technology has many examples within a building, but it solely depends on your requirement. However, regardless of your objectives, the main goal of using smart building technology remains the same for the masses.
Your smart building applications will help you to monitor the area of operation, gather data, analyze it, and provide you with some actionable steps that you can use to improve your overall business operations.
Below are some of the potential implications of smart buildings.
- If you want to reduce your electricity cost, IoT-based sensors will monitor your facility and inform you about the consumption pattern of electricity. Leveraging the power of smart building data, you can enhance efficiency, strategically reduce your electricity consumption to ensure optimal utilization of resources and efficient use of equipment.
- Suppose you want to maintain healthy indoor air and reduces the risk of disease transmission, particularly during the pandemic-induced environment. In that case, you can install cost-effective sensors everywhere across the buildings to monitor air quality inside your facility and guarantee HVAC equipment’s optimal functioning.
- Suppose you want uninterrupted working of critical equipment. In that case, you can harness smart sensors to measure the most crucial aspects of their operation, such as humidity level, compressor vibrations, the temperature of refrigerating gas going into and out of evaporators and condensers, and the temperature within a refrigeration unit.
Without any further ado, we’ll dig deeper into some standard smart building equipment.
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Smart Lock – Door Controller
With smart lock or Wireless-enabled door controller, users no longer need to carry house keys along with them. Harnessing the potential of this smart device, you can lock and unlock doors with a tab of fingers or a voice command. Besides, a smart lock enables remote access, so you can allow your guest to enter your room during your absence.
Even though Smart Lock is a relatively new technology, but it is consistently evolving with time. Before the advent of this technology, peoples mostly used fingerprint scanner or digital assistant support.
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Potential of Smart Door Controller
Smart locks have completely revolutionized home security. They come with customization tools and functionality that gives you complete control over what happens to your home. Unlike ordinary locks, no one can tamper with a smart lock. If someone attempts to tamper with it, you’ll receive a notification immediately.
Many smart locks come with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity that increases their portability. If the smart lock lacks a Wi-Fi connection and has only Bluetooth connectivity, you’ll face a severe connection problem, particularly if your front door was too far away from your smart door hub.
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Indoor and Outdoor Tracking
The indoor and outdoor tracking system provides a comprehensive end-to-end, tried and approved robust asset and personnel tracking system. Leveraging the power of bespoke hardware and a wide range of radio technologies like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and LoRaWAN, you’ll locate and point out assets and personnel within a visual map in real-time.
An indoor and outdoor tracking system is designed specifically for hospitals, ambulances, construction sites, laboratories, and retail stores.
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Temperature and Humidity Measurement
Air temperature monitoring system should be installed in all the places used to store time and temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products (TTSPPS), predominantly temperature-controlled rooms, cold rooms, freezer rooms, refrigerators, and freezers.
The accuracy of an electronic sensor must be within the range of ±0.50C. For an optimal outcome, we strongly recommend placing sensors in an area wherein the variability of temperature is likely to occur. Furthermore, they must be positioned so that transient event such as door opening won’t affect them.
Similarly, a humidity monitoring system must be placed in an area requiring a humidity-controlled environment, such as temperature-controlled rooms used to store time and temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products. The accuracy of the humidity monitoring system must be within the range of ± 5% RH and mounted at an optimal location to monitor worst-case humidity levels within the qualified storage volume.
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Air Quality Monitoring
An air quality monitoring system is designed to measure air parameters, such as wind speed, direction, and other weather-related parameters. Furthermore, it measures the concentration of pollutants in the air such as SO2, NOx, Co, THC and O3 and particulates that changes consistently throughout the year.
You can customize the mobile phone application of AQMS to monitor many sites simultaneously. The measured data can be monitored remotely, and you can then send that data to local authorities.
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Power and Energy Efficiency
Power and energy efficiency monitoring system enable end-users to control their energy consumption by consistently monitoring energy flow with dedicated software. It operates 24/7 and provides comprehensive historical data to the users to ensure the optimal utilization of energy resources by electrical systems in their facilities.
Today, the industry is the largest consumer of electricity; that’s why to remain competitive in the market, the industry needs an uninterrupted supply of electricity. However, there are two significant impediments: scarce energy resource and the skyrocketing cost of available energy resources.
Energy contributes 30% of total input cost in many low margin industries such as Textile and Leather tanning. That’s why to remain competitive in the market, and the industry should have to manage energy consumption and keep the cost at a bare minimum. Herein the significance of power and energy efficiency monitoring system comes in very handy.