Monitoring Your Building’s Heart Rate

You might think it can’t possibly be too difficult to run a building, day-to-day… and you may be right. Until we start talking about buildings of a certain size.

We can put more insulation into a house to save on heating costs. We can install solar panels on the roof and drill wells to connect to geothermal heat pump systems to create more efficient heating systems.

But that’s usually a big investment, especially in a larger building — and particularly in office buildings. It’s an investment you might not see a return on for 10–15 years. And who knows what new technologies and products will be available then?

However, large office buildings often give you a lot of potential and opportunity to save money from day one, with relatively modest investments. It’s more like optimising the infrastructure you’ve already invested in, rather than spending lots of money on new technologies.

For example, let’s look at the ventilation system. It shouldn’t blow at full steam at weekends, when nobody’s around, should it?

And it's certainly silly to spend energy ventilating vacant rooms.

You face similar challenges with hot water, underfloor heating, air conditioning, lighting, maintenance and other necessities.

Optimise everything, though, and you could save a lot of money.

Smart Systems

Imagine you have a seminar room filled with 100 people. Wouldn’t it be great if your building’s systems could be programmed to know about the seminar and adjust its settings for that particular room accordingly?

Seems like magic, doesn’t it?

The problem is, there’s no simple way for you and I to do that at the moment. Is there?

Meet Serinus Technology.

Who, as you've probably already guessed, is a client of mine.

See, this is exactly what Serinus Technology does.

Serinus IEQ Audit is Serinus Technology’s platform for auditing buildings. It’s a network of sensors connected to a central piece of software.

These sensors and the software analyse the data in relation to the building's technical characteristics, performance, use and usage patterns to control technical systems and energy consumption as efficiently and effectively as possible.

So why the heck did they talk to us?

Pulling Everything Together

Well, it's nice to have sensors and all, but simply pulling raw data like air quality, lighting, temperature and even acoustics isn't much good by itself; you need to store it somewhere and analyse the data to make sense of it.

But when you do analyse the data, magical things can be done. Like:

• The systems knowing how many people are in a room and adjusting the settings accordingly
• Turning heating and air flow down at night
• Letting the caretaker know that something's acting up
• Reporting exactly what's spent where, so the building's owner can make informed decisions about where to spend money and where to save it

Simple things like that can make a huge difference to the running costs of large buildings.

Serinus Techonlogy came to us because they know we can take ideas and prototypes and create software that incorporates all those ideas and data — and make something profitable out of it.

In fact, they told me: “The solution that you now have built, i.e. the result of measurement, analysis and use, will help to reduce energy costs for customers with a minimum 20-30% savings.”

This is great news for Serinus because they’ll have a lot of delighted customers — customers who’ll be keen to work with them again, and who will refer new customers to them.

Your Business Has Systems Too

If you think of your business as a building, you'll quickly realise that you too have areas you can improve on.

I want to point out three important facts in that regard:

1. If you doubt you do have areas you can improve on, you probably don't know your numbers. If you're like most business owners, your business probably leaks money like a perforated bucket. And that’s without considering the lost opportunities.

Now, you should know your numbers of course — every business owner and manager should. But it's probably not your fault — how could you know when nobody's told you?

So keep reading.

2. It’s easy to put right. However, it means you'll have to take a good, hard, long look at your business and challenge your old ideas about how you run it and what's possible.

3. You need routines. You need procedures. You need structure.

You need a system.

If you think you could easily improve your business by putting proper systems and solutions in place, you’re in luck — that’s what we do.

And I’d like to help you — after all, together we could save your business a small fortune (and maybe even make some money, too).

Click here to find out if you qualify for a free telephone consultation. Answer a few simple questions and if your business is suitable, you can schedule a call.